What to fix before you list, and what to leave

Bottom line: fix what a buyer’s inspector will write up, declutter hard, and leave the kitchen alone. The money on a sale is decided by what turns up two weeks after the offer, not by the things you have been apologising for. Deal with water going where it should not, a roof near the end, and anything electrical that is obviously wrong. Then spend almost nothing on decluttering, cleaning, light and small repairs, which change how the house shows more than a renovation does. Renovating to taste is paying for a decision the next owner wanted to make themselves.

I am Dan Jones, a REALTOR with Royal LePage Locations West in Penticton, licence number 1118346, licensed since 2004. I built houses for twenty-four years before that, so what follows is the order I would work in rather than the order most sellers use.

There is an order to this, and it is almost the opposite of the order people use.

Most sellers start with what they can see and what they have been apologising for. The kitchen, the carpet, the paint colour. Buyers start there too. But the money is decided by what the inspector writes up two weeks later, and that is a different list.

First: the things that end deals

These are not improvements. They are the removal of reasons to walk away or renegotiate.

Water going somewhere it should not. Grade sloping toward the foundation, a patio poured with no fall, staining at the base of basement drywall. This is the most expensive category of problem in this valley and it is usually visible from the driveway. It is also the one buyers are most frightened by, because they cannot price it themselves.

Where the roof water goes is half of that, and it is the cheapest half to fix. Newer homes generally have downspouts tied into underground drainage. Older ones discharge at grade and rely on extensions to carry water away from the building, and those extensions get removed for mowing, cracked by frost, or were never long enough.

If yours are tied in, the thing to watch for is water surfacing or pooling near a downspout, which suggests the underground line is blocked, collapsed or root-filled. On older clay tile that is common, and it is invisible until it backs up.

If yours discharge at grade, walk the house in the rain. Water coming off a roof and landing against the foundation is the beginning of most of the problems on this page, and extending a downspout properly costs almost nothing compared to what it prevents.

The roof, if it is near the end. Not the shingle colour. The condition, and the valleys where two planes meet and water concentrates. An inspector will call it. So will the buyer’s insurer.

Anything electrical that is obviously wrong. Undersized service, aluminium branch wiring, knob and tube, DIY work that was never inspected. These have insurance consequences, which means financing consequences. Service size gets its own note below.

Old plumbing. Poly B or galvanized. See below. Both have become insurance questions more than plumbing ones.

Vermiculite in the attic. Also below, and this one is a health question before it is a sale question.

Fix these, or price for them honestly. What does not work is hoping nobody notices, because somebody is being paid to notice.

Then: the cheap things that change how it shows

Declutter, hard. The single highest-return thing you can do, and it costs nothing but effort. Rooms read as smaller when they are full. Counters, closets, the garage, the spare room that became storage. Keeping it that way through weeks of showings is its own skill: showings while you still live in the house.

Clean, properly. Windows especially. It changes the light in every photo and every showing.

Paint, selectively. Not the whole house. The rooms that are actually tired or in a colour that will fight every buyer’s imagination. A patch job in a mismatched sheen looks worse than the original.

Light. Replace dead bulbs, match the colour temperature, open everything before a showing. Dark rooms photograph badly and show worse.

Fix the small broken things. The sticking door, the running toilet, the loose railing. Individually trivial. Collectively they tell a buyer the house has not been looked after, and that suspicion gets applied to the things they cannot see.

What to leave alone

The kitchen, unless it is genuinely failing. A new kitchen is an expensive bet that your taste matches an unknown buyer’s. Bathrooms for the same reason. Flooring, usually. And anything structural you are tempted to cover rather than repair, because painting over a stain moves the conversation from what you fixed to what you hid.

Full detail on when renovating does and does not pay: should you renovate before selling.

Pre-listing inspection

Worth considering on any older home, and I lean toward it for most of the South Okanagan’s older stock.

The argument is timing. If a problem is going to be found, you would rather know before you set a price, when you can fix it, price for it or disclose it, than during subject removal, when it becomes the buyer’s leverage. The catch is that you have to disclose what you learn. That is the mechanism working, not a reason to avoid it.

Full detail, including how BC licenses inspectors and what an inspection cannot tell you: should you get a pre-listing home inspection.

If the house is older

Everything above applies to any house. Homes of a certain age carry a further set of items, and they are the ones that most often decide whether a sale closes. Plumbing, electrical service, asbestos, oil tanks, retaining walls, the roof.

Those have their own page, because the list got long enough to deserve one:

What to check in an older South Okanagan home

Go through it before you price the house. Every item on it is a number, and whoever knows the number first controls the conversation about it. Know what is in your house and you set a price with it already accounted for. Find out when the buyer’s inspector does, and you are negotiating down from a figure you already announced.

The roof question

People ask what a new roof adds. The honest framing is that it does not add, it removes a deduction.

Nobody pays a premium for a roof they assume is fine. They discount hard for one they expect to replace, and both the inspector and the insurer will raise it. If yours is near the end, the decision is between replacing it and pricing for it, and which is better depends on the property, the market and how much cash you want to put in before closing. That is worth a conversation before pricing.

Forty years of belongings

For most of my downsizing clients this is the real work, and the transactions are the easy part by comparison.

It cannot be done in a weekend and it is not really about storage. The workshop, the boxes in the basement, the furniture that will not fit in eleven hundred square feet. Each of those is a decision, and some of them are hard ones.

What I have seen work:

• Start earlier than you think. If you are listing in spring, start now.
• Sort by decision, not by room. Keep, family, sell, donate, discard. Rooms mix all five and you stall.
• Do the easy rooms first to build momentum, and leave the loaded ones for when you have practice.
• Get help. There are people locally who do exactly this work, and for a large house it is money well spent. Ask me and I will point you to someone.

I have watched more downsizing moves come apart over the contents of a garage than over financing.

What I do

I walk the property before anyone talks about price, and I tell you which of the above actually applies to your house. Usually the list is shorter than people fear and different from what they expected.

Worth saying plainly: this is the same list I run when I am showing a house to a buyer. Age of the plumbing, size of the electrical service, what is in the attic, whether the place ever heated with oil, how old the tank is. By eye, without touching anything, I am not an inspector and some of it should not be disturbed, but I look, and I say what I see out loud, because a buyer deserves to know what they are taking on.

Which is the honest reason to deal with these before you list. The agent standing in your house with a buyer may well be doing exactly what I do, and if they are not, the inspector will be. Either way it comes out. The only question is whether it comes out while you still have options.

If you want to see the same list pointed the other way, at a house you are thinking of buying, that is here.