The Repairs Worth Doing Before You List, and the Ones That Are Not
Part of my job is walking through a house before it goes on the market and telling the owner what to fix. After more than 25 years doing that in Oakville, Mississauga, Milton and Burlington, the pattern barely changes. Owners point at the big things — the kitchen they wish they had redone, the bathroom that dates the place. The things that will actually cost them are smaller and cheaper, and they stopped noticing them years ago because they live there.
Here is roughly how I sort it.
The Tally in Their Head Is Bigger Than Your Invoice
A buyer walking through a house is adding up costs as they go. The trouble is that the number they land on is rarely the number you would have paid. A torn screen you could have dealt with cheaply becomes an unknown in their head, and unknowns get rounded up.
Then it compounds, because small broken things also tell them something. A screen door that sticks, a window that will not open, a latch that does not catch. None of it is expensive. All of it says the same thing quietly: if this was left, what else was left.
The repair costs a little. The doubt costs a lot, and it does not always arrive as a lower offer. Sometimes there is no offer at all, because the buyer walked out wondering what else had been ignored in the places they could not see. And sometimes it is the pile — enough small things that the house starts to look like a project, and they decide it is not worth the bother when there is another one to see that afternoon.
Usually Worth Doing
Anything a buyer will touch, open or close. Doors, windows, screens, latches, handles. These are the parts of a house people physically operate during a showing, and something that does not work in their hand is the thing they remember in the car afterward.
Anything affecting light and air. A window that cannot be opened because the screen is torn or the frame is bent gets written off by a buyer as a window that does not work, and they move on without mentioning it.
Anything that takes an afternoon, needs no permit, and leaves nothing half finished.
Renovating Is Not Automatically Part of It
Selling does not always mean taking on a big project. What a house needs depends on the house, which is why the first conversation is a walk through it rather than a list handed over at the door. But a lot of what pulls a buyer’s attention the wrong way is small, and clearing those things up is part of the same planning as everything else. Take care of what you can. Every distraction you remove is one less place for a buyer to stop and start wondering.
The one thing to be careful about is starting something you cannot finish. A half-done project sitting in the listing photos is worse than never having started.
Screens, Specifically
Screens are the clearest example of the small thing that reads as neglect. They sit at eye level, they are the first thing a buyer puts a hand on when they slide open a patio door, and a torn or bent one is among the more common things I end up pointing at.
Two things I have seen fixed that stuck with me. Sliding screens that had stopped rolling properly were adjusted and moved smoothly again — which sounds minor until you watch someone try to open one during a showing and give up. And at my own house, with dogs, standard screen mesh did not stand a chance. Switching to a more durable screen meant it stopped being something to repair every season.
The other thing that matters, particularly when a house is being prepared for sale, is that Doctor Screen comes to you. When you are already packing, staging and juggling showings, the last thing you need is loading screens into a car and losing them to a shop for a week. Work done in the driveway on the same visit is worth more than it sounds like.
Where to Start
Start with what a buyer will notice in the first ten minutes. What a house needs past that depends on the house, and that is a conversation worth having before any money gets spent.
Damir Strk is a Broker with RE/MAX Realty Specialists Inc., Brokerage, serving Oakville, Mississauga, Milton and Burlington for more than 25 years. Learn more at damirstrk.com.
Need screens done before your listing goes live? Contact Doctor Screen — we come to you, work on-site, and leave the same day. Call us toll-free at 1-844-723-7888.