Selling a home can be stressful and time-consuming. However, many homeowners don’t realize that their social media accounts can unexpectedly affect their home-selling process. While most people are aware of the importance of updating their privacy settings, you should also pay attention to certain posts that could negatively impact your ability to sell your home.
What to Keep in Mind When Posting About Your Home Sale
When selling a home, it is important to keep in mind that potential buyers may look at your social media pages before making an offer on your property. As such, it is best to avoid posting any information related to the sale of your home online. Additionally, it’s wise to double-check any comments you make on other people’s posts or photos related to your sale as well. Negative comments about the sale or potential buyers could reflect poorly on you and hurt your chances of selling.
For instance, when we’re representing a buyer and negotiating an offer, we google the seller and find out everything we can about that person. If the seller posted a picture on Facebook of the $1.5M house they just bought, had a recent job promotion on LinkedIn, or posted that they moved out of state, we are going to play hardball during the negotiations as we know that seller needs to sell that property asap.
On the flip side, when we represent a seller, we do the same thing and Google the buyer. You’d be surprised how often we find the buyer posting a status update that says, “We just put an offer in on a beautiful house we absolutely love. This is the ONE!! Wish us luck, everyone. Hope we get it.” When we see that, we’re not going to let our sellers negotiate on the price at all as we know that the buyer is desperate to own this house and will come up in price.
Updating Your Privacy Settings
It is also important to update your privacy settings when selling a home. This helps ensure that only approved viewers can access personal information about you or your home sale. It also helps guard against scammers who might use public information about the sale for malicious purposes. Many social media platforms allow users to customize their privacy settings to be visible only to approved followers or friends. It’s also important to regularly update these settings as new features are added over time, and changes may occur without users being aware of them.
While it’s okay to let your friends know you’re buying or selling a home, don’t say why and try not to post anything about your new place until after you’ve closed on the property. Then you can go hog wild on social media!
Here’s a tip: preview your page as an anonymous user so you can see what information on your social networking pages is public, and what is being kept private.
Remember, there is no such thing as true privacy online, so, don’t put any information online that you don’t want the world to see.
Taking the time now will save headaches later down the road when it comes time to close on a sale! If you need help updating your privacy settings, let us know. We are happy to help you.
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