Five ways to save money when selling your home

how to save money
5 ways to save money when selling your home

Selling your home is an expensive proposition. There are many things that you have to do if you want to get the top dollar for your home. You have to spend money to make money, but you don’t have to break the bank. 

Here are five ways to save money when selling. 

Five ways to save money when selling your home

1. Stage your home yourself.

Professional home staging is expensive. You can spend anywhere from around $1000 to over $4000 in staging fees. You can save all of that money if you do it yourself. 

Home staging essentially has three parts. 

  1. Deep cleaning
  2. Decluttering and
  3. Depersonalizing  

Knowing that, you can save thousands of dollars with just a little elbow grease and some time well spent.  

2. Pre-sale home inspection

A small investment in a pre-sale home inspection will save you time and potentially hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Discovering and correcting problems ahead of time will allow you to keep control of the sales process, hire your own contractor and do things in your own time rather than loose control to the buyer or worse yet lose the sale altogether. 

3. Paint

Nothing (except perhaps home staging) has such great return on investment than painting. New paint makes a home look cleaner, and often brighter and can usually be done within a couple of days. If you do it yourself, you can probably paint your entire house for as little as $2000 to $3000. (The rule of thumb for hiring professionals is to double the DIY cost estimate). 

4. Commission

The saying with commissions is “if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”. You don’t want to try to save money by hiring a discount brokerage or going the “for sale by owner” route. If those methods worked well they would be more common. 

Currently in Kitchener-Waterloo the typical commission is 4%, of which the cooperating brokerage gets 2%. You can probably find someone to do it for less, but I would strongly advise against it. Pay the commission and you will not only save money, you will also save time and a lot of pain and worry. 

5. Repairs

Minor repairs can be easily taken care of by the homeowner or if there is enough of them by a handyman or contractor. You should certainly fix minor problems to reassure the buyer that the home has been well maintained. 

Major repairs (typically an old roof) should also be done. The fact is that a major repair will scare away many potential buyers. You don’t want to scare away buyers. Furthermore, buyers will over estimate the cost of repairs or add an inconvenience tax to the works. So repairs that you do not do will cost you more at the time of sale. 

Further reading:

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