Removing personal pictures from your home is one of the first and easiest things you’ll do when staging your home for sale. There are three reasons you want to remove personal pictures from your home when it’s on the market.
1. You want to leave room for the buyer to imagine their family, not yours, in the home. First impressions happen very quickly, and it’s just easier for a potential buyer not to have to erase an image of your family so they can picture themselves at home. Only about 10-20% of buyers can imagine the changes they want to make to your home. Don’t stress the other 80% who can’t.
2. Buyers love to wander over to your wall or table of family pictures to see if they know you. It’s only human; we want to connect. They’ll want to see if they know you from high school, if you look like them, or if your kids are about the same age as their kids. Any time they spend trying to make these connections with you, they aren’t making the connection with the house, which is exactly what you need to have happen.
3. It’s just prudent to safeguard your family. Buyers are strangers, after all, and there is no reason that you need to let strangers know how old your kids are, what activities they participate in, and what your family likes to do in your free time.
Most sellers don’t want to remove family photos because they think that means removing the frames and necessitating a new paint job. Not so. One easy trick is to replace family photos with landscape art that goes with your decor. In this shot, you can see that the homeowner doctored a family hallway montage, and now it features some peaceful seaside shots. Still pretty, still framed, but now something that draws you through the space to the next beautiful room, instead of slowing you down in the short hallway.
