With home prices in Riverside, California back on the rise, more homeowners are thinking about selling their homes. When selling your home, you let countless strangers in your home, often when you aren’t present. Posing as potential buyers, burglars have used the home-buyer ruse for years to get inside a home and find out what’s valuable.
Request that any real estate agent showing your home leave a business card with the names of the potential buyers written on the back. Although this won’t prevent burglars from lying just to get inside your home, even the smallest of precautions can dissuade a thief from selecting your home among the thousands available.
Hide your prescription medications. One small bottle of thirty pills can be worth hundreds of dollars to prescription drug users. In just one weekend of viewing houses, a seller can snag hundreds of pills in just a few hours. Worse than losing your pills to a thief — trying to get an immediate replacement and paying those out-of-pocket costs for a prescription.
Stash away the small electronics. In a house where everyone including the kids has an iPhone, iPad, and laptop computer, a thief can make a fast dollar slipping an iPhone into his or her pocket while you are busy showing off the new appliances. The more small electronics, the more likely the burglar will want to return to your house for a full sweep of valuables.
Don’t show the house at night. There is no better way to see where to hide at night, than from inside the house. A night visit will also encourage thieves by indicating which houses are dark at night and what kind of cars are parked on the dark streets after work.
If you have decided to sell your home, contact a security firm to walk through the house and show you weaknesses. A good security firm is always happy to promote their services — for this home or your next.