6 Home Seller Mistakes That Make Buyers Cringe

There are a few common home seller mistakes that make buyers cringe that you need to avoid when selling your own home.

Want to sell your home? Get a FREE home value report.
Want to buy a home? Search all homes for sale.

Here are the six home seller mistakes that make buyers cringe that you need to avoid when listing your own home:

1. Having a home that smells bad. Buyers will pick up on this the second they walk in the door and it can cause them to freak out. Always make sure your home smells great once it’s on the market. 

2. Giving your home too much personality. Sometimes sellers customize their homes too much to their own tastes. Fixing a room with multi-colored walls is as easy as opening a new can of paint, but when buyers walk through your home and see something like that, they won’t be thinking about how much it will cost them to fix—they’ll be thinking about why you didn’t fix that yourself. 

3. Turning down a showing. We recently ran a few statistics on our listings, and we found that every time a seller declined a showing, there was only a 33% chance that that buyer would reschedule and come back to look at their house. When a buyer wants to see your home and you make that difficult for them, they’ll probably keep on looking and never come back. 

4. Setting up cameras to view any showings. I once had a client who set up nanny cams all throughout their house so they could watch every single showing and they were calling me to discuss buyer feedback before the buyers had even left the house. This can be an advantage when it comes to negotiations, but if buyers know they’re being watched, that can be a major turnoff for them and their agent. And they will know they’re being watched because, by law, you have to disclose that you have cameras in your house during a showing. 

5. Being present at your own open house or showing. There is nothing that makes buyers cringe more than this. Buyers want to be able to do things like open doors and cabinets and talk freely to whoever they came with. If you’re hanging out at your own showing, they’ll want to get out of there as soon as possible. You want a buyer to spend as long as possible inside your home, because the longer they’re there, the more likely they are to make an offer. 

6. Pretending you’re a potential buyer for your own house. In this scenario, buyers show up to their own open house and talk about how fantastic it is. Agents can spot this kind of thing from a mile away, and buyers usually can pick up on it too. 

If you have any questions or you’d like to talk more about potentially selling your house, don’t hesitate to give us a call or shoot us an email. We’d love to help you.