Preparing your home to sell

Before you buy paint, walk through your home with the team as if you were a buyer seeing it for the first time, starting at the curb. The point is to see what a stranger sees: the peeling trim on the garage, the dated light fixture in the hall, the room that has become storage, the smell of the dog that you stopped noticing years ago. From that walk the team gives you a written list in priority order, split into what must be done, what should be done if time and budget allow, and what to leave alone because buyers will not pay for it. Gather your documents at the same stage: the survey if you have one, permits and receipts for major work, warranties, the age of the roof, furnace, air conditioner, windows and water heater, and any rental contracts on equipment. A buyer's agent will ask for all of it, and having answers ready reads as a well-kept home.

The repairs that return the most are the ones that remove doubt. Fresh paint in a light neutral colour is the single most cost-effective change in almost every home. After that: fix anything that drips, sticks, rattles or flickers, because a buyer who finds three small faults assumes a fourth they cannot see. Replace burnt-out bulbs and brighten dim rooms. Re-caulk tubs and re-grout where it has darkened. Clean or replace furnace filters and have the furnace and air conditioner serviced so the receipt can sit on the counter. Address obvious exterior items: a cracked step, a loose railing, gutters full of leaves, a fence panel leaning. Where a system is at the end of its life, such as a roof or a furnace, decide with the team whether to replace it, price it in, or offer a credit; the answer depends on the home and on what competing listings offer. Full kitchen and bathroom renovations before listing rarely return their full cost and are usually not recommended.

Buyers need to picture their own life in your rooms, and that is hard to do around someone else's. Remove roughly a third of what is in each room: excess furniture, the contents of crowded shelves, small appliances on the counter, most of what is on the fridge. Pack away family photographs, collections and anything that tells a buyer whose home it is. Clear closets to half full so they look ample. Then stage: the team's stager decides what stays, what is moved and what is brought in, focusing on the rooms buyers weigh most heavily, which are the living room, the kitchen and the principal bedroom. Furniture is pulled off the walls to create flow, window coverings are opened or removed to let light in, and a few well-chosen pieces give scale to empty rooms. Both Royal LePage and the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board describe staged homes as showing better and spending less time on the market, and the team's experience matches that. A vacant home almost always benefits from staging; an occupied one benefits from editing.

Nearly every buyer sees your home on a screen before they see it in person, and the photographs decide whether they book a showing. The team uses a professional real estate photographer, shot after staging and a deep clean, on a day with good light. Prepare for the shoot the way you would for the most important showing: every light on, blinds open, counters clear, beds made, toilet lids down, cars out of the driveway, bins out of sight, and pets and their bowls elsewhere. Floor plans with measurements are included so buyers can check whether their furniture fits, and a walk-through video or a virtual tour lets out-of-town buyers and busy ones pre-screen without a visit. Exterior and neighbourhood photographs matter in Mississauga, where the ravine behind the lot, the lake at the end of the street or the park across the road can be the reason a buyer comes. If it is winter and your garden is a feature, send the team your own summer photographs; they can be used with a caption.

A pre-listing home inspection is optional, and it is worth considering for older homes, homes where you are unsure of the condition of major systems, and estate sales where nobody has lived in the house recently. An inspector gives you a written report before any buyer does, so you can repair what is reasonable, price what is not, and avoid the renegotiation that follows a surprise on a buyer's inspection. Making the report available to buyers can also support offers without an inspection condition, which strengthens your position when there is competition. There is a caution: once you know about a problem, you know about it, and that has consequences for disclosure, which the next section covers. Ask the team for inspectors it has seen do thorough work, and talk to your lawyer about how to share the report with buyers and what to say about repairs you did or did not make.

Ontario's general rule is buyer beware: a buyer is expected to find, through a reasonable inspection, defects that are visible or discoverable, such as worn flooring or an old furnace, and you have no duty to point those out. The exception is a latent defect, one that a reasonable inspection would not reveal, that you know about and that makes the home dangerous or unfit to live in. Real estate lawyers describe this as the line you cannot cross: a known hidden problem of that kind must be disclosed, you cannot actively conceal a defect, and you cannot give a false answer to a direct question. The Seller Property Information Statement is a voluntary form; many Ontario lawyers advise clients not to complete it, because every answer becomes a representation you can be held to. Whether to complete one, how to describe a past water problem that was repaired, and what to say about matters such as a death in the home are questions for your lawyer before the listing goes live, not after an offer arrives.

Book a pre-listing walk-through with the team and get a prioritized preparation list for your home before you spend a dollar.