Should I Pack Away My Photos When Selling?

Sellers want to know whether they should remove personal photos when selling their home. Many REALTORS feel all photos should all come down because buyers want to picture themselves in the new house, not the current owners.

Here's my opinion: Leave some pictures so the buyers know it's a wonderful family, or couple or individual selling. Let buyers know a little about you through your photos. Buyers want to konw if this is a happy home and your picture can show that. But don't make your home a gallery of every photo ever taken.

When buyers walk through a home, if there are photos on the walls, photos in frames on living room tables, bedside tables, on refrigerators, etc, it's too much for a variety of reasons. One, it's distracting. We stop at every wedding picture and think, oh, what a lovely couple or worse, I don' like the color of those bridesmaid dresses! Or at each baby picture we stop and say, "what a cute baby." We see pictures of every trophy won and we try to read what it was for. We wonder whether we know the owners or their children. Basically, it disrupts the flow of the tour and we are looking at the photos and not at the home. Everyone once in awhile there is an inappropriate picture.... and being human, we make judgements. Those judgements can subconsciously transfer over to the home.

Secondly, buyers DO want to picture themselves living there and too many seller photos establish the home as the sellers' home, not their possible new home. Too much history to erase, they can't picture themselves living there, can't picture making memories of their own.

My suggestion is to keep the photos that are your absolute favorites and put them on one table in the living room or den. Pack the rest in boxes. Take a cross section of the ones that mean the most to you. The buyers will stop once and glance, get an idea of the kind of good house karma that exists through your photos, and move on to see the the rest of the house.

The bonus? You've already packed one box and are that much closer to moving!