Helpful guide
Maximize Your Sale
Sellers are offered a lot of advice, most of it about things that do not matter much. Renovate the kitchen. Bake bread before showings. Hold an open house every weekend.
Four things move the number. Everything else is at the margins.
1. The first three weeks are the whole game
A new listing gets its largest, most motivated audience in its first two or three weeks. Every buyer already searching that criteria sees it at once. Price it correctly and that audience competes. Price it high and that audience moves on — and they do not come back when you reduce.
The reduction almost always arrives anyway. It just arrives after the best buyers have stopped looking, which is why overpricing so often ends below where correct pricing would have landed.
2. Prepare the things that pay, skip the things that do not
Full renovations rarely return their cost at sale. Paint, lighting, decluttering and targeted repairs usually return several times theirs.
The highest-return work is almost always pre-empting the inspection. A buyer who finds five problems renegotiates for far more than those five problems cost to fix — because by then it is leverage, not maintenance.
- Neutral paint where the color is distinctive rather than merely dated
- Every bulb working, and brighter than you would live with day to day
- Clear the surfaces — counters, mantels and the top of every dresser
- Fix the obvious inspection items: running toilets, loose railings, dead GFCIs
- Deal with any water in the basement properly, because it will be found
3. The photographs are the showing
Almost every buyer decides whether to walk through your house while looking at a phone. The photos are not marketing for the showing; they are the showing, and the walk-through is the confirmation.
Professional photography is not a luxury line item on a listing. On a property worth several hundred thousand dollars it is among the cheapest things that measurably affects the outcome.
4. Compare offers on terms, not just the top number
The highest offer is not automatically the best one. A cash offer that closes in three weeks, a conventional offer with 25% down, and an offer at a higher price with a tight appraisal gap are three genuinely different propositions.
What matters is which offer actually reaches the closing table at the number on the contract. That is a judgment call, and it is most of what you are paying an agent for.
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