Your Dream Home: How Too Many Customizations Can Make It Hard to Sell

From Leopard print carpet to walls covered n crushed velvet, there are personalized touches that you can add to your home to make it all your own but if you ever decide to sell your home, those customizations you added can make your home sit on the market for years. Why is that? Because when people are looking to buy a house, they want to see homes that they can actually see themselves living in and just imagine how distracting it can be for a potential buyer to walk into a room where the walls in the bedroom are mirrors… floor to ceiling.

It’s one thing to have a unique sense of style and reflecting it in your decor but to add permanent changes, whether it’s on the interior or exterior of your home, it can be a major turn off to lots of potential buyers. Your home’s decor is something that’s pretty easy to switch up and change or even get rid of whenever you want… those are personalized touches. If you want vanity front cabinets in your kitchen, you can easily hire a custom cabinet company to install those… that’s what you would call customization.

Personalization vs Customization

In the world of real estate, the decor and presentation of your home are going to have a mixture of personalizations and customizations. You generally want to keep your customizations to a minimum and go all out with personalization but when it comes to someone’s dream home, they’re not thinking about what it will look like on the market because they have no intention of selling their dream home…

In their minds, they feel that they can do as many customizations and personalize it however they want because it’s their forever home. It’s easy to feel that way because the fact that you’re making all these changes to your home to meet your needs aesthetically and from a functionality point, you know that there’s no way you’re going to move because there won’t ever be a house that will meet your needs like your customized home, right?

Of course, but once you understand the difference between customization and personalization you might change your mind on some of the addition or changes you want to make to your home. Take a look at what it means to personalize your home and what it means to customize your home.

Personalization

Personalization is design elements that reflect your own personal style and taste. The design elements are typically easy to change. Just think of it like this, if someone comes over to your house and they walk in a room and make the comment “this room is so you,” that means that based on how you decorated the room, people are able to tell that a lot of your own personal style is reflected in it.

Customization

Customization is the act of modifying something to meet the needs of an individual or to perform a certain task. These types of modifications are typically more of a long-term addition to a home and aren’t as easy to change as elements of personalization. Things like built-ins are customizations. You have to think of it like this… when it comes to your home, you are customizing it to meet your needs.

Customizations That are Good For You But Bad For Business

Now that you know the difference between the two design elements, we’re going to zero in on customizations and take a look at customizations that suit you in your dream home but have the potential to be total blunders when and if you decide to sell.

According to Trulia, the two rooms that homebuyers base their decision to buy is the kitchen and the master bathroom. Those are definitely two big selling rooms that you want to make sure you have looking nice and appealing for home tours. All of that is true but HGTV states that there are also unique features that make a home sell as well. The key thing to remember is that if you decide to sell, you have to know how to decorate to sell your home and too many crazy customizations can ruin your chances.

Too Much Square Footage

Have you ever seen celebrities who live in houses with 12 bedrooms and 10.5 bathrooms but it’s just the one celebrity living there? If you can think back to the early 2000s there was a show called MTV Cribs where celebrities would take viewers on a tour of the place where they call home. The majority of the time, those houses were just too big and maybe served a purpose when friends and family came into town.

If you can believe it or not, there are non-celebrity folk who have this same issue at hand… too much square footage. It may not necessarily be on the same level as having 15 bedrooms and 10.5 bathrooms but the square footage that is found in some of their homes have absolutely no purpose and aren’t even being utilized except for a few times out of the month or year.

People that aren’t of celebrity status will either build a house with too much square footage or they’ll just continue to add on to their small to the midsized house. Things like adding a spa room or adding bedrooms to convert them into rooms specifically made for your three dogs. And to top that off some people have doggie doors cut out into the doors so the dogs can actually go in and out. If a buyer came and viewed a house with doggie doors cut out of bedroom doors, they’re not even going to want to go through the hassle of having the door replaced.

Outlandish Amenities and Features

Some people can really go over-the-top with the amenities and features they put in their homes. We’re not talking about basketball courts or tennis courts… those are features that homebuyers may find very appealing. Those features also add more value to a home. There are some people who will add various amenities and features to their homes simply to show off “how their living.”

A very popular feature of a home is a fish tank. Now, having a fish tank in a home is not uncommon at all but to have an entire wall that’s a fish tank is a little outlandish, especially when you could care less about fish. A potential homebuyer viewing that house could immediately be turned off by the fish tank because they would want the responsibility of getting their own fish to put in the tank or the responsibility of taking care of the fish. Not only that but if any potential homebuyer was interested in the house but not the fish tank, it could be a huge financial burden to have it removed.