Selling your house in Toronto requires a lot of up-front leg work. It often seems like all you need to do to sell a house in Toronto is slap up a for-sale sign and wait a hot minute for the offers to come rolling in. The truth is, the more time you spend preparing your home for sale, the sooner it will sell. So, what kind of work should you do in advance, and how soon should you start prepping your house for sale? Depending on your house, the more time you give yourself to prep it for sale, the better.
Our team has a successful track record of selling homes for a lot of money in a short amount of time.
We don’t do this through the magic sauce, and it isn’t just the luck of working in a hot market. Our success comes from a lot of methodical behind-the-scenes, not very glamorous work. I’m giving you a glimpse of our process so that you, too, can best prepare your house for sale. Obviously, we hope that you will read this and hire us to sell your home. However, even if you don’t hire us, feel free to benefit from our years of experience and our well-honed system.
Hire a real estate agent early
The sooner, the better with this one. A good real estate agent will drive the ship to get your house listed. Your real estate agent will advise you on the best time for you to bring your house out on the market. They will also provide you with a list of their trusted contacts who can help you get your house ready for your sale. Real estate agents are also good at promoting your house before it even hits the market. If your house hits the market and there is a buzz about it with other agents, it is already off to a good start.
★ Learn what to look for in an agent by reading: Four Characteristics Of A Great Listing Agent
Home inspection
Do a home inspection well in advance of listing your house. This helps in two ways. The first is that it allows you to fix any problems in advance of the sale. You only need to fix the problem you want to fix, but the cleaner the home inspection is, the more likely it is that your home will sell quickly and for a lot of money. Some common issues that sellers often fix themselves are caulking and flashing around windows, mild mold remediation, and replacing old furnaces. The second reason you want to have a home inspection done in advance is that it will help you and your real estate agent be more realistic about the price. If a large issue emerges in the home inspection report, you can decide not to remediate and lower the listing price. The important thing here is that you should disclose it to all potential buyers once you know about an issue. The market is so favourable to sellers that your house will likely still sell even with issues as long as you are realistic about the price. If you are planning on buying a house before you sell your home, it is essential to have a home inspection completed in advance of your purchase to know exactly how much money you’ll have on the purchase.
★ For more information on home inspections read: What Home Inspections Don’t Reveal About A Property
Interior designer consultation
Staging and painting matter so much when selling your home that it is worth spending money on and planning for it in advance. Staging and painting matter more than any other kind of renovation does. Our team hires an actual interior designer who has more credentials than a stager. Our designer advises clients on paint colours to help make your home look more fresh and contemporary. She also helps advise clients on small renovations that they might want to do before listing their homes. Always with a mind to being budget-conscious, she can tell you how to update your kitchen and bathrooms to make you the most amount of money. She can also stage a whole house and manages the process of furniture rentals and placement. When she’s done, there will be soap in the soap dispensers, toilet rolls in the bathrooms, fresh flowers on the tables, books on the night tables, and macarons in the kitchen. In other words, the properties we list for sale always feel warm and lived-in rather than sparse and sterile.
★ For more seller resources check out:
The more time you have to prepare your house for sale, the better. However, we understand that sometimes you only have a week or two to prep your house. That’s also OK. Believe it or not, we follow these same steps whether we have three months or three weeks. We can do this only because we have good working relationships with all our preferred trades (home inspectors, contractors, painters, etc.). As I said, this is a well-honed system. Often, it can feel like a let-down to prepare your house for months only to have it sell in a day. The quick sale is a testament to the amount of preparation you did. This is only the first part of our process for listing a home. Next week we will write about our marketing strategy.
As always, stay safe.
Robyn VandeVennen
The Kim Kehoe Team
