As the weather turns colder, I’m spending more time with buyers showing them houses in the dark since as of Sunday it gets dark at 5pm. This week I went out and bought a new big flashlight simply because many of the homes I’ve been showing lately have no electricity and my little flashlights just didn’t do the job. While learning a home has no electricity AFTER getting to the house is annoying, simply finding many townhomes in the dark can be a huge challenge.
Last week I showed 1980′s quad townhomes to one client where there were almost no exterior lights on the townhomes. I literally had to go driveway to driveway, turn on my highbeams, and look at the house numbers on the building. I don’t understand why that development didn’t have more lighting… it was kinda creepy being so dark.
Also last week I went with a different buyer into a row townhome development that was just finishing its final phase of construction. All the streets and buildings were well lit, but the house numbers were on posts 5 feet in front of the lights and the numbers were a shiny gold color. It is next to impossible to read something that is gold colored in the dark of night when it is backlit by bright lights. That is simply a case where the builder did something that looked good but didn’t bother to imagine the consequences. What if you had guests coming and they’ve never been there before? More importantly, what if you have a medical or police emergency and they spend wasted minutes trying to find the unit because they can’t read the house numbers?
I’d recommend you take a look at your home at night this week and ask yourself: “if someone needed to find me, could they?”
