If you want to hurt your chances of selling your home, follow these examples!
Most home sellers worry about the cleanliness and staging of their home. Some worry about the number of people coming through because of their “possessions”, whether they be artful and rare or shabby and not chic.
From the Realtor’s perspective, you can learn a lot about the people living in a home – sometimes more than you want to know. Many moons ago, one of the classic knowing too much stories was before the advent of cell phones. Everyone had a landline and an answering machine. As a sellers’ home was being shown, the doctor’s office called to tell the good news: the test results confirmed you’re pregnant! Another time, the doctor’s office called to say that the mammogram results were clear – no breast tumors. Needless to say, this was more information than anyone wanted to know.
It’s laundry day
During another showing, it was obvious the laundry had just been completed, and like any practical woman who doesn’t like to keep buying bras, the lady of the house did not put her bras in the dryer. They were hanging all throughout the bathroom air drying – every style and color.
We hope you like our artwork as much as we do
Art work is always interesting in homes – from provocative bedroom pictures to hallway portraits with fig leaves on a string covering the male owner’s anatomically correct portrait.
Sometimes there’s more to the story
Once while showing a home, a woman become so upset when she entered a baby’s room because the owner of the home had a plaster cast of herself while pregnant. The prospective buyer left the house and went straight to the car. At first I thought she might be upset because she thought this was too personal and she didn’t want her husband looking at the cast of another woman’s body. About an hour later, after everyone had calmed down, it was revealed that this couple had been trying to have a baby but couldn’t. Seeing a room as the baby’s room was about all she could handle, but seeing a pregnant belly casting put her over the edge.
Don’t give someone a reason not to buy
The take away message here is that even though you as the seller may be comfortable with your choice of artwork or clothes drying, the person looking may become very uncomfortable with what they see. While the seller may be proud of their belly cast, you never know what experiences the buyer has encountered, and when you’re trying hard to sell your home, giving the buyer any ammunition to find a reason to “not” buy your house doesn’t benefit your cause.
The fig leave portrait home, however, sold in one day!
