Protecting Your Privacy While Your Home is on the Market

Before a home goes on the market and home buyers start to traipse through, sellers typically 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 naively 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 your mail where anyone can find it.
Lots of sellers leave piles of opened mail neatly stacked on the kitchen counter. Buyers could easily 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.  If a buyer knew that kind of information, imagine what price the buyer would be thinking about. It wouldn’t be list price.

Remove Diplomas and Wedding Photos from Walls
Although all personal items should be removed, sometimes sellers fail to notice 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 may 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 discriminatory. 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.

Closets’ contents
Frequently sellers who are separating or getting divorced feel a lot of pressure to sell quickly, especially if the partner who remains in the home cannot afford to continue to maintain it. But that is not information most sellers want to share with buyers. Yet they do.

They do this by hanging either all men’s or all women’s clothing in the closet. Was it a heterosexual or bisexual involvement? Who cares? It’s nobody’s business, really, if a seller is dissolving a relationship. But once a buyer finds out a seller desperately needs to sell, the buyer won’t make an offer anywhere near list price. So don’t leave any revealing clues around that could give away your motivation to sell.

Before you put your home in the market, please, prep it, remove contents from drawers, stage closets and pack up anything remotely personal. If your house is speaking to a buyer about you, it’s probably saying the wrong thing.