Tips To Keep Your Belongings Safe While Opening Your House To Sales Visit

Sales visits to your home can be exciting, stressful or downright irritating, but they are extremely important and you must remain calm throughout the process. If your residential apartment in India is located at a prime location or the structure generates envy among your neighbours, footfalls during the sales visits would certainly be high. Higher footfalls mean that there may be mischievous elements among the crowd which you cannot differentiate because you have to treat all the potential customers of your residential property as equal.

If it is a fully-furnished, ready-to-move in flat, the accessories become more precious because they would soon belong to someone else. So, keeping your belongings safe is a very important issue.

Here are a few tips to ensure the safety of your belongings during visits by prospective homebuyers to your residential apartment:

1-Lock valuables

The more scattered your belongings, the more difficult it becomes to take care of them. Put all your expensive stuff together in a showcase under the supervision of someone you trust and reduce the risk of them being stolen. If you have jewellery in your home that you are not wearing, keep it in a safe or a locker, along with cash. Always keep the key to the locker with yourself. Another way of keeping your belongings safe is to put the small-yet-expensive stuff in a handbag or briefcase and carry it around with you all the time. For items like clothes and dressing accessories, you can use a cupboard and keep it locked.

2-Mount CCTV cameras

If the crowd visiting your home is too big to keep an eye on all by yourself, it is always a good idea to install CCTV cameras for extra vigil. A visible CCTV camera, functional or not, can deter miscreants and scare them. Rather than installing the CCTV cameras in every room, you can just use them in the rooms where you have kept most of your valuables. However, if there are expensive furniture, electronics or rare artefacts, you can install a camera in the living room, which would also help you in keeping track of all those who enter and leave through the front door. Many upcoming residential apartments in India have security features, including pre-installed CCTV cameras, alarms, detectors and scanners.

3-Don’t keep expensive stuff at home

If you are planning to sell your home it probably means you have got a new place somewhere. Keep all the items you think will invite robbers in your new home. But if your new home is an under construction apartment, collect all the valuable stuff and keep them at a trustworthy friend’s or relative’s place. However, there are things like furniture and showpieces which you have installed to impress the homebuyers in India. For safety, you just need to be careful and keep checking whether everything is in place or not.

4-Hire private security services

Even the appearance of secure residential apartments in India can act as a deterrent to would-be criminals. Hiring the services of a uniformed private security guard or two is a great idea to keep mischief mongers at bay. The presence of professional security guards keeping an eye on your property and taking periodic rounds through the premises while visitors are shown the place would avert any mischief. Be sure to instruct the guards to be courteously aloof so as not to offend potential homebuyers in India.

Katya Bellamkonda is a Mumbai-based writer. She has spent the last nine years reporting on many sectors in India including energy, infrastructure, technology and telecom.