Preparing your property

Presentation is the first thing every buyer sees. The goal isn’t a renovation. It’s removing the easy reasons for a buyer to discount, so the conversation is about the home and its price rather than a list of jobs.

High-return fixes

The work that reliably returns more than it costs is cosmetic, fast and boring:

• Paint. Fresh neutral walls are the cheapest transformation in real estate. A few thousand dollars of painting routinely adds multiples of that in perceived value, because buyers mentally price “needs painting” at triple the actual quote.
• Street appeal. The front fence, letterbox, lawn edges, a pressure-washed driveway and a $60 pot by the door. Buyers form their offer range on the footpath.
• Light. Clean every window, lift wattage, replace dated fittings, trim whatever’s blocking the living-room sun. Photographers and buyers both buy light.
• Minor kitchen and bathroom refreshes. New tapware, handles, regrouted tiles, a resurfaced benchtop. The aim is “nothing to do here”, not “newly renovated”.
• Fix the small broken things. Dripping taps, sticky doors, cracked switch plates, the gate that doesn’t latch. Each one whispers “what else haven’t they maintained?”

Money pits

Big renovations done specifically for sale rarely pay. A $60,000 kitchen might add $40,000 to the price; the buyer would rather have chosen their own benchtop. Pools, full bathroom gut-jobs, extensions and structural work almost never recover their cost on a pre-sale timeline, and they delay your campaign by months. The rule: renovate to live, present to sell. If a room is genuinely dated, it is usually cheaper to price it honestly than to rebuild it for a stranger’s taste. Our guide to what to fix before selling goes room by room.

Decluttering is free and worth more than most renovations

Half-empty cupboards read as ample storage. Full ones read as “this house is too small”, even to buyers with twice your stuff. Clear benchtops, thin out furniture so rooms breathe, take down the family photo wall (buyers need to imagine their own life in the frame), and hire a storage unit for a month if you must. It costs $150 to $400 and is the best presentation spend per dollar available.

When staging pays

Professional styling earns its keep most clearly in three situations: vacant properties (empty rooms photograph small and echo at opens), tired or dated interiors where good furniture redirects attention, and competitive metro markets above roughly the suburb median, where buyers compare your listing photos against a feed of styled ones. Industry claims about staging adding 5 to 10 per cent to sale prices are vendor-funded and best taken with salt, but the asymmetry is real: on a $900,000 home, staging needs to add less than half a per cent to break even. For a well-furnished, well-kept home, a consultation plus partial staging usually captures most of the benefit at a third of the cost. Our guide to home staging costs has the price ranges.

Photography timing

Book photography after every other job is finished, not before the last trades visit. Brief the photographer on your property’s best hour: north-facing living areas mid-morning, west-facing gardens late afternoon, and a twilight shoot if the facade or view earns it. If you’re planning a spring campaign, consider shooting the garden at its peak even if you list weeks later. And shoot before the signboard goes up; nothing dates a “fresh” listing like its own For Sale sign in the hero photo.

The pre-sale building and pest inspection

Commissioning your own building and pest report before listing ($400 to $800 combined) is one of the genuinely contested calls in selling.

The case for: no surprises mid-campaign. You learn about the termite damage or the dodgy subfloor while you can still fix it cheaply or price it calmly, rather than at the negotiating table where every defect costs triple. In the ACT, a building and pest report is part of the mandatory pre-listing contract pack anyway, and some sellers elsewhere offer their report to buyers to keep momentum up and conditions out of contracts.

The case against: the cost, and the knowledge itself. Once you know about a defect, you cannot honestly characterise the property as though you don’t, and in some states (notably Queensland under its disclosure regime, discussed in Chapter 9) your formal disclosure obligations are growing. Serious buyers will commission their own report regardless and may not trust yours.

The sensible middle: if your home is older than 30 years, has had past termite activity in the area, or you don’t know its condition, get the report. Going into a negotiation knowing less about your home than the buyer does can cost five figures in an afternoon.