I was chatting with a friend recently who happens to be in the market for a new home. She thought of me when she did a drive-by of a property she saw online, in the rural area where she lives.
It was the perfect location for her family and it was surrounded by attractive homes but there was a huge "Keep Out" sign on the actual house itself. The second thing my friend noticed was a black and yellow "No Trespassing" sign on a post in the yard and another one nailed to a tree along the driveway.
She was certainly not interested at all in picking up the phone and calling her agent to book a showing.
A basic home staging tip would be to take down those signs!
She was happy that her husband insisted on driving by to look at the home beforescheduling a showing. They couldn't help but wonder what sort of thing could possibly go on there to warrant erecting three signs to keep people away. Is there a security issue? What goes on in that house?
I would imagine any prospective buyer who pulled into the driveway as described by my friend, would have been turned off enough to not want to get out of their car. That's the purpose of a Keep Out sign, after all to keep people from wanting to enter!
There isn't any excuse for listing a property in that condition. If it was not a bank foreclosure and the homeowners are actually trying to sell that property, they need to start looking at their home not as the place where they live, but as a real estate listing.
If it was a bank foreclosure, either the financial agent or the real estate agent should have had those signs taken down. That alone could make a big difference because the truth is, a home that looks like it's in foreclosure is not attractive to most people.
According to an article on CNN Money, there were a record three million homes in foreclosure in the US in 2009 and that number isn't expected to go down anytime soon. Given this large number, I'm surprised there aren't more home stagers pursuing the foreclosure market.