How to Keep Your Home Safe while it is on Sale?

Selling a home isn’t essentially an unsafe process; however, it is always good to take precautionary safety measures to ensure the safety of your family and your belongings. Discussed here are a few safety tips that not only help you increase your home’s safety, but also make it more attractive to potential buyers, thereby ensuring a smooth home sale procedure.

1. Tuck away all the valuables

Putting away all your collectibles and valuables ensures more security and safety of your home and also gives a better look of your home to the potential buyers. While there are surely some genuine buyers out there, but there are also kids who have the habit of putting things in their pockets and there are some people who come disguised as prospective buyers with an intention to steal things. The most common items that go missing from homes that are on sale are:

• Jewelry
• Mini gadgets such as watches, iPods, tablets and laptops

The stolen items, however, aren’t just limited to these. Kids’ toys, prescription drugs, kitchen items, expensive artifacts, etc. are some of the other things that are known to be stolen. Keeping these things away doesn’t give a chance for you to regret later. Hiding your personal stuff also depersonalizes your home and helps prospective buyers to imagine themselves in the house.

2. Track the people who come to see your home

A very good safety measure is to keep a track of people who come in your home. Maintain a diary and make it a point that whoever enters your home, register their name, address and telephone number in that diary. In case anything goes missing, you have the contact details of all the people to probe.

3. Register the home with a known realtor

The best way to ensure random people aren’t walking into your home is to sign up with a realtor, who when registers your home on MLS (Multiple Listing Service), sets a condition that other realtors can visit your home with prospective buyers only. Most of the potential buyers that come through realtors are screened. So you only people that have mortgage pre-approval or have enough money to buy a home.

4. Avoid the open house

In Open House, your home is available for public viewing. The idea is to give opportunity to public at large to see your home hoping one of them could be your buyer. Although, most people come to see the house, there are many who just want to get a peep into your lifestyle or the things you have. Some also come to gauge the place for future thefts, or merely to have free food and drinks, which may be there.

Open houses are ideally, fruitful only for realtors who want to acquire buyer leads, rather than actually selling the home, as Open house account for less than 6% of homes sales.

5. Setup Security Cameras

It is a good way to keep a watch on every nook and corner of your home without being actually present all the time. The internet security cameras are cost effective and they have the facility of live streaming and recording. Apart from using as a safety guard while selling the home, it is an additional asset and increases the home value as well.

Be careful of one thing though, never spy on people. While using the security cameras, inform the realtors or potential buyers that they are been filmed. It addresses the privacy issue, and knowing that they are being watched, people shall keep their hands to themselves.

6. Hide all personal information

Pictures of you and your family, calendars, fridge notes, magnets – all these things can give away way too much of personal information. For example, Sam’s football class at 4 on Friday. People could use these details for all the wrong things. Keep your home impersonal, as it is better to be safe than sorry.

Though home selling process is generally safe, but by taking these precautionary steps, you can ascertain the safety of yourself and your loved ones.