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Home Security Could Affect the Value of Your Home

While we were leaving the house with the whole family last week, my husband was joking about what would happen if both of us forgot our house keys.  Then he told me that if that ever happened, he could easily break the door in with force.  This he was not joking about.  Well that did not make me feel very good about our level of home security, especially when our family is at home.

I remember when we were considering purchasing this house, we had said that we wanted to add a third lock to both the front and back door.  At the time, we were thinking about childproofing the doors as well as home security.  Well, our real estate agent at the time actually recommended that we do not.  His logic was that, when it came time to selling our home, a third lock on the door would make potential buyers feel like the house was not located in a safe neighborhood.  That got me thinking about how "perceived" home security would affect the value of our home in the eyes of potential buyers.

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We will likely be putting our home on the market within the next year or two.  There is already security lighting in place outside, but we may want to replace the front and back doors because, yes, we did install those third locks.  I am also wondering if it would be a good investment to at least install doorway alarms.  House alarms tend to be perceived as something homeowners in nice neighborhoods would install to protect their home and families from non-neighborhood intruders.  Such alarms are not seen as something that is installed to protect a home from the homeowner's own neighbors.

Of course, perceived home security is just one of many things we will need to consider before we put our home on the market, but it is definitely an important one.  It currently is most certainly a buyer's market, so we will need to make our house as attractive as possible to potential buyers.