If you’re intending to sell your home, tidying it up before any viewings may be a good idea as a new study shows that 24% of the viewing time is taken up focusing on clutter and mess.
The latest research was put together by Anglian Home Improvements and used eye tracking technology to find out what house hunters are really looking at when viewing a property.
The study found that men tend to focus on the outside of a property whilst women are more preoccupied what the inside looks like.
To put this study together, a range of house hunters viewed a property while wearing eye tracking glasses to find out what grabbed their attention during the viewing.
Furnishings and decor took up 27% of the house hunters’ focus during a viewing, whilst 24% were spent looking at the clutter and mess around the house. To put this into context, the property’s layout only took up 4% of the viewing time.
Female viewers struggled more to look past the clutter as they spent 28% of their time looking at it whilst male viewers only spent 20% of their time looking at the mess.
The results revealed that, even though not all viewers mentioned the mess to the agent, their eyes were still drawn to it when panning the room.
Similar to clutter and mess, personal items also caught the viewer’s eye a lot. The data revealed that house hunters often made eye contact with particular photographs, which led the viewers to be distracted from other elements in the room.
Melanie McDonald, head of PR at Anglian Home Improvements, said:
“It was very interesting to learn that so little of the participants behaviour was focused on the building and structural features, apart from the things that needed to be fixed.”
Checking out the property’s exterior features took up 22% of the viewing time, with 17% of that spent looking outside through the window.
Based on the study’s findings, Matt Carey, head of digital marketing at Anglian Home Improvements, suggests that sellers should focus on a couple of areas and aim to improve those. These include keeping a tidy garden and clearly defining any boundaries between your and your neighbour’s property.
