Thursday, November 11, 2010

Protect Your Privacy while your home is for sale

Are your secrets safe? Before your home goes on the market and home buyers start to walking through, savvy sellers will relocate confidential information. Even so, you might be astonished to learn what home buyers can figure out about you.



Private Documents


• Is it snooping to open a drawer?


Not if the drawer is part of a built-in such as a kitchen cabinet or a dining room china cabinet. Buyers can innocently tug on a drawer to inspect its construction or depth and find important documents that you might not intend for anyone to see.






• Don't leave mail where anybody can find it.


Lots of sellers leave piles of opened mail neatly stacked on the kitchen counter. Buyers could find out how much you owe department stores or other credit cards. They can tell if you're late on your mortgage payments or if the I.R.S. is after you. Heaven forbid should you file bankruptcy or be sued and leave those documents on the table, but sellers do it. They must believe that buyers will not read someone else's personal mail, even when that mail is taped to the refrigerator door, begging to be read.


  • Remove Diplomas and Wedding Photos from Walls

Notwithstanding that all personal items should be removed, sometimes sellers overlook the obvious and leave diplomas on the wall. People form biases and can carry a bias too far. For example, the seller might be a lawyer, and there are buyers who might not feel comfortable buying a home from a lawyer. For whatever reason. Diplomas also give away a seller's age or a close estimate. If a buyer sees a recent medical diploma, for example, the buyer might assume the seller is saddled with student loans and needs to sell to pay them off.


Wedding photos might give away the seller's religion, as do certain religious artifacts left in the home. Buyers can be prejudiced. Don't give buyers a way to form any opinion about you at all. Don't let buyers form ideas about you from the type of music you like or the literature you read.


So before you list you home for sale pack up anything remotely personal. If your house speaks to a buyer about you, it's probably saying the wrong thing.


Please leave your comments below; I would love to hear from you!


www.woodbridgerealestate.blogspot.com

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