Remove Treasures When you Offer your Home for Sale
You have lovingly decorated your home with treasures…and some of them may be fixtures, attached to the house.
You may have your great-grandmother’s chandelier hanging over your dining table. Your late father may have hand-crafted the medicine cabinet in your bathroom. Your son may have built the swing that hangs on your porch.
All of those things bring you joy every time you look at them, and you wouldn’t dream of parting with them. Now that the house is for sale, what should you do?
Take them down now and put them in storage. Replace them with items that look nice and fit well with the house. If you don’t, you run the risk that your prospective buyers may find that Grandma’s chandelier is the most distinctive feature of the house - they love it and they want it.
And that’s when the problems begin. It sounds ridiculous. After all, those items are of great sentimental value to you, and mean nothing to strangers. But if they’re beautiful, or distinctive, or useful, they’ll want them. A rule of thumb is that anything attached to the house can be presumed to stay with the house, so it isn’t unreasonable for buyers to expect to get all the fixtures they see.
It doesn’t matter that you’ve excluded certain items on your listing. If you’re on multiple listing, many agents may show your house. Some won’t have taken the time to notice and list the excluded items. Others will notice and tell the buyers… drawing their attention directly to the object they can’t have.
The purchase or sale of a house is much more than a financial transaction. It is a time of high emotion as you prepare to leave a house that holds memories. Emotions also run high for your buyers. Excitement and anticipation combine with hope that they’ve chosen the right house and worry over unknown problems. In this emotional climate, something as small as a dispute over a wrought iron pot rack hanging over the kitchen range can cause tempers to flare and transactions to fail.
So, since the house does need things like lighting fixtures and medicine cabinets, replace them now. Don’t risk killing a sale because someone fell in love with a treasure you can’t part with.
Click here to contact me if you have any questions.
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