Back when we bought our brand spanking new built for us house (okay, from a list of features) over 10 years ago, you couldn’t view your house “from space”. Not from the space station, but from an aerial view like in Google Maps. Your home buying process pretty much involved looking at a map, driving around the neighborhood and looking at what neighborhoods and/or eyesores surrounded your potential house, and in our case driving down a muddy road to see the home site (or at least what it looked like before the topsoil was ripped off and anything resembling nature was scraped from the earth). Now, I can view my house on Google Maps from a tiny little blip on the East Coast all the way down to if I happened to be walking to the mailbox when they snapped the picture, you could tell what color my housecoat was. Which for a house buyer, is an absolutely fantastic thing. But for a home seller, it can be a nightmare.
Let’s say that you are a buyer driving through a potential neighborhood and wow, the houses are pretty. Everyone takes such good care of their yards, there are no rusty clunker cars up on cinderblocks mucking up their driveways, the roads are wide and tree-lined. And the house is fantastic! Let’s buy it! But that night, you decide you want to see where the nearest grocery stores are….. or you want to find the quickest way to get to the big highway that gets you to work fast. So you look on Google Maps. And you zoom in on that house that you loved, that you already have arranged the furniture in “in your mind”, and find that 10 feet beyond those beautiful trees behind your dream house is…. what is that?! Is that an industrial site? No, it looks like a bunch of tractor trailers or something. Let’s zoom in on that area more. OMG, it is a scrap yard where they crush old trailers and make them into neat little squares of metal! No wonder the price was so low on that house! Whew! Thank god we didn’t sign those papers!
Now imagine that you are the homeowner that is trying to sell that house. 10 years ago when you bought your house, it was pristine farmland. Everyone loved the neighborhood, the houses practically sold themselves. The first people who resold in the neighborhood made a tidy profit. Things looked good. Then Google Maps came along. Unbeknownst to you a small industry had been thriving on the land not zoned residential behind your house. Didn’t really bother you, you couldn’t see what was going on through the trees and you couldn’t really hear any noises from the area, what with everyone out cutting their well manicured lawns every nice day in the summer. But Google Maps saw the small industrial area. And snapped a photo “from space” of the industrial area on a day when there was a backlog of work piling up on the lot. That photo went out on the internet for everyone to see. No big deal, one of many snapped that day to make our life as consumers and car drivers easier. But now you are trying to sell your house. And every time someone “Googles” your address, that big old picture pops up and some potential home buyer, before they have even driven by your house, sees the now “huge seeming” industrial area and says “ugh! Not that house, it is near some big icky factory or something!”
So my advice to you, is look at your house “from space”. If Google (okay, I am picking on them because they are huge) took a picture on a day when your house/neighborhood/area wasn’t at its best, everyone will see it. And there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it. Just make sure your next house looks pretty from space.
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