If you are getting a home ready for sale, the received wisdom is simple. Tidy up, clear the surfaces, make it look bigger. New research suggests that advice is right, but badly incomplete.

A survey of 2015 UK adults, commissioned by Access Self Storage and carried out by Research Without Barriers, found that 38% of people say poor storage space would put them off buying a property. That was the single most off putting feature tested. Clutter and junk followed close behind. Poor décor, the thing most sellers spend money fixing, ranked well below all of them.

The same research also found that 46% of people have regretted getting rid of belongings when moving house. So the pressure to strip a home back for buyers is real, and so is the cost of doing it in a hurry.

Here is what the numbers actually say, and what they mean if you are about to sell.

Storage and clutter beat décor as deal breakers

When asked which factors would be most likely to put them off buying a property, respondents said:

Three of the top three answers are about space and stuff. Décor, meaning wallpaper, paint colours and dated kitchens, sits at less than half the rate of poor storage.

That is a useful reallocation of effort. Repainting a hallway is a weekend and a hundred pounds. Making a home read as well stored and uncluttered is mostly a question of what you remove, and where you put it.

The garden is worth flagging on its own. At 37%, junk or clutter outside the house is nearly as damaging as clutter inside it, and it is the thing sellers most often leave until last, because it is not in the photographs.

Buyers want tidy, not empty

There is a temptation to read all this as strip everything out. The data does not support that.

Asked which type of home appeals most when viewing a property to buy:

• 28% prefer a tidy, decluttered home with minimal furniture
• 25% prefer a lived in home with furniture and personal belongings
• 17% prefer an empty property with no furniture
• 23% say it makes no difference
• 7% are not sure

A tidy home with minimal furniture wins, but only narrowly, and a completely empty property is the least popular of the three. A quarter of buyers actively prefer to see a home lived in.

The practical read is that you are aiming for edited, not evacuated. Enough furniture to show what a room is for, few enough possessions that the buyer can picture their own.

The storage squeeze is not only a selling problem

One finding puts the whole thing in context. 51% of UK adults have chosen not to buy a household item because they had nowhere to store it. Just over half the country has, at some point, been priced out of a purchase by cubic feet rather than pounds.

And when people do run out of space, they improvise:

• 33% store items in the garage
• 31% in the loft
• 29% in the shed
• 21% at a family member’s or friend’s house
• 14% in a storage unit
• 8% at work

Which explains why storage reads so loudly to buyers. Most people have lived the problem. When they walk into a house with no loft hatch, a garage full of someone else’s boxes and a single narrow cupboard, they are not making an abstract judgement. They are recognising something.

Meanwhile, 56% say they feel weighed down by the amount of possessions they own, made up of 17% who feel it frequently and 39% occasionally. The audience viewing your home is, by and large, already tired of its own stuff.

Nearly half regret what they threw away

This is the finding that complicates the standard advice, and the one that sits directly behind Jonathan Rolande’s observation about pre market mass decluttering.

Getting rid of things is regretted at nearly one and a half times the rate of keeping them. And yet 40% say their approach when moving is to get rid of items before the move, even if they are unsure. That was by far the most common strategy.

So the most popular tactic is also the one most likely to be regretted. That is not a discipline problem. It is a timing problem.

A quarter of movers wish they had more time

The research asked how people feel when moving home:

• 35% feel confident making decisions during a move
• 28% wish they had more time before deciding what to keep or throw away
• 19% feel under pressure to make quick decisions about what to keep
• 10% have never experienced this
• 8% are not sure

Nearly half, 47% combined, are either short of time or under pressure. And when asked about the most stressful part of moving house, unpacking and getting organised came top at 43%, ahead of legal documents and contracts at 37% and setting up bills and utilities at 35%. A further 21% named knowing where to store belongings while between properties.

Only 15% of people deliberately delay their keep or discard decisions until after they have moved, and only 4% have used self storage to buy themselves more time. Cost is the main reason people rule storage out, named by 58%, followed by 23% who have simply never considered it and 18% who do not know where units are.

What this means if you are selling

Where a flexible completion date changes the maths

Almost all the pressure in these numbers comes from a fixed, externally imposed deadline. You have a completion date, the boxes have to go somewhere by then, and unsure items get binned because there is no third option.

That is one of the less discussed advantages of a cash sale. When you sell to a cash buyer there is no chain, no mortgage approval on the buyer’s side, and the completion date is negotiable. Some sellers want it fast. Others want eight weeks to work through a loft properly, or a completion set for after a specific date so they only move once.

For context on why chains dominate the stress conversation, 26% of respondents named being part of a property chain as one of the most stressful parts of moving, and the wider research found 70% see price as the biggest barrier to buying a home today, with 44% naming mortgage rates. Those are the pressures that create the artificial deadlines in the first place.

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