Home sellers reconsidering what they show online

CHARLOTTE — Scroll through real estate listings and you can get a sense of what every square foot of a home is like.

“Once they’re out there, it’s tough to pull it back,” real estate advisor Mark Ruane told Channel 9, adding that many home sellers are reconsidering what they’re showing.

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“Over the last few months, I’ve had clients who have been very sensitive to having their children’s images show up [and] family photos,” Ruane said.

When a home goes up for sale or rent, a listing agent uploads photos to a multiple listing service, known as MLS.

Those images end up on real estate sites like Zillow and Redfin, which leads to other companies spreading those photos to a global audience.

“Privacy is becoming more of an issue by the day,” Ruane said, adding that you can get real estate photos blurred or removed from sites like Zillow and Redfin. But once they’ve been published, scrubbing them from the internet entirely can be tricky.

Ruane recommends hiding as many personal belongings as possible: “We want to kind of paint a picture that this is a setting which is inviting, but yet we also want to be protective of our clients.”

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Security analyst Dan Linskey said he’s seen examples that could be used to target home buyers: “I’ve had cases where it listed in the real estate listing that there was a safe – a large safe in the master bedroom built in.”

He said, if you’ve already bought or rented a home, download the listing photos to keep them for your records.

Then, you want to make sure interior images are removed from real estate websites. Realtors often will remove them for you, but it’s important to follow up and confirm.

“We as consumers and a community have to make sure that we’re taking the steps we can to limit their ability to use technology to harm us,” Linskey said.

Real estate experts tell Channel 9 it’s okay for photos to remain on the MLS system for licensed realtors to use, but they should not remain on public sites for everyone to see.

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