Patch Blog: Mistakes to Avoid While Showing Your Home

There are many serious and learned articles and blog posts detailing the "5 Most Profitable Fixes" for selling your home or "Is Staging a Home For Sale Worth It?" and the like. Heck, I might have written posts like that myself.

Here, in Eagle Rock and Mt. Washington, we have a slightly less confirming idea of what is normal or acceptable. In fact, I think most of us shudder at the thought of living the tract home, white bread existence. We want whole grain! Color! Texture! Life! Soul! And yet ... .

Even the most global and open-minded amongst us has limits. With that idea in mind, this article is about "What Not To Do" if you are selling your house. The funny thing is ... I have encountered every one of these situations in my showing career (many of them right here in the neighborhood):

Do not cover all of your windows in aluminum foil and drape red cloth over all of your lamps. This might work if you are selling a bordello. A single family home? Not so much.

If your roommates are creepy pedophile-looking middle-aged men who smoke like crazy kick them out or make sure they leave whenever a buyer comes to see the home. Telling the buyer that the roommate in question is good with gardening and would like to stay after the close of escrow will not help your sale.

The detritus of your "personal relations" does not make you or your house look "cool." Trust me. No one wants to see the underbelly of your personal life. The studded collar? The how-to books? Put them away.

The smells of home cooking do not add to your home's value. It is a common idea that the scent of vanilla on a light bulb or baking cookies in the oven will make people feel good about your home. This does not extend to open kimchee bottles, cumin-scented dishes or fried fish. I happen to love the smell of cooking garlic, but to some it just smells like skunk. I like eating this stuff just as much as you guys do, but to smell the aftermath? This is not good, people, not good.

Your teenaged, goth/emo son needs to leave during showings and open house. Having him slouch in front of a computer while playing some horrifically loud and violent computer game is distracting. His grunts are off-putting and he needs to pull up his pants. Seriously. No one needs to see that.

Skeletons, whips and Ouija Boards are not good staging props. For that matter, neither is the hearse in the garage. One or two, okay—that's a personal quirk. All over the house in a variety of media, size and form? Creepy.

If you simply must follow the buyers around as they tour the home, put on a shirt. Some sellers feel that only they can properly show their home and they almost always wrong. But if you must show the home, please be fully clothed. The buyers will thank you. So will the realtor.

Lastly, do not frolic in the bedroom five minutes before a scheduled open house or showing! Freaked out buyers and realtors do not always come back.

There you have it. A "Must Not" list for every home seller.