How much does getting your home ready to sell cost in Toronto and Ontario?

There are many things to consider when putting your home on the market. And there are many costs associated with selling your home. One thing that you should be budgeting for and doing is getting your home ready to sell. You want to make sure that your home outshines all of the competition when putting on the market.

Ideally, you will want your home to be so appealing. That is so potential buyers will be compelled to call their agent and schedule a viewing. Because it is so attractive to them. They have fallen in love with seeing the pictures of your home in the online MLS. You want to make your home as appealing as possible. That is to increase the number of prospective buyers coming through your door. So they will begin to look at it and putting up offers.

You might be thinking, ok, why should I do this? Selling your home is competitive in Toronto, the Toronto real estate market at least is currently a buyer’s market. Homes on average are taking longer than previous years to sell. So you will need to be ready to put in the work and money to make your home shine.

In this article, we will provide a brief overview of how much you can expect to spend to get your home ready to sell in Ontario. We will also be providing tips for getting your home ready to sell. It will be for all budgets and information about staging your home to sell.

How much does it cost to get your home ready to sell in Toronto and Ontario?

How much you will spend to get your home ready to sell depends on some factors. And to stage it to market will depend on the value of your home. Other factors are size, the condition it is in, how much you can spend. You shall also consider where you are located geographically, among other factors. 

It is recommendable when staging your home to spend anywhere between one to three percent of your home’s total value on staging. Given this, you might want to be prepared to pay anywhere between one to three percent of your home’s overall value. That is for any necessary repairs, upgrades, updates, maintenance, or renovations that need attention.

That is especially the case if you have an older home that did not get any maintenance for a long time. Also, it goes the same if there is a lot of deferred maintenance that needs to get done to improve your home’s condition and safety. 

Getting your home ready to sell does not have to be expensive or time-consuming. Consider hiring a professional stager. That is if you have the money and want to potentially increase your home’s final sale price and help to ensure that you sell your house quickly.

If you are curious about staging a home works and the potential benefits of staging a home to sell, check out our guide. It also talks about how much staging a house might cost in Toronto and Ontario. [How much will home staging cost in Toronto?]

Regardless of your budget, you might consider hiring professionals to do an extremely thorough, deep clean of the inside of your home. You should be cleaning all of the glass on the inside of your home. Steam clean your carpets (you can probably rent a carpet cleaning machine and do this yourself if you are so inclined). Aim to declutter your home seriously. 

You might want to look into what Mari Kondi is doing. For decluttering and purging items that you no longer need and does not bring you joy anymore; this is an excellent time to do it! And anything you are keeping, but you can live without for a little while, you can consider putting these items into storage at a place that is not your home. You should also be doing any critical minor repairs and painting the walls in more neutral colours. 

Doing all of these simple things to stage your home, whether you are doing this yourself or hiring professionals to help you will probably be time-consuming. While you might save money doing any of these things yourself, you should be prepared for this process to take a while. Hiring professionals has the potential to save you time and can allow you to focus on doing more important things. The larger your home is, the longer it will take you to get it ready to sell, this means you will be more time, energy, and money to get it ready to sell. 

Rules for staging your home to sell regardless of your budget

De-personalize your home

You will need to de-personalize your home so buyers can easily imagine what it would be like to live in your home. That means you will need to remove and store any family photos or photos of loved ones. You should clear your closets, your drawers, and be clearing out anything that could be considered unnecessary clutter.

It might feel strange and take a long time to remove all of the evidence that you live in your home. It includes removing your photos, knick-knacks, many of your possessions, and belongings. However, consider this. If you were looking at a house to buy you would probably have some difficulty imagining what it would be like to live in this home. That is if you are distracted by seeing someone’s family photos or souvenirs from trips. You might love looking at these items, but buyers will be distracted. 

You probably love looking at these keepsakes, but you are selling your home, and you need to consider potential buyers. The easier it is for a prospective buyer to imagine living in your home, the easier it will be for you to sell your home more quickly. 

Maximize the available space in your home

Getting your home ready to sell is a great reason to declutter your home if you have not already done so. You do not want buyers to see any overstuffed closets, drawers, cupboards, and cabinets.

If these storage spaces are overstuffed, this will make these storage spaces appear insufficient. It is recommendable that you find somewhere safe to store your belongings. That is for the items that you want to keep. Take it all out of your home before putting it on the market.

Sanitize your home

When you are putting your home on the market to sell, you want your house to be spotless. Ideally, your home should be so clean that it looks like it could be in a commercial for cleaning products.

Yes, this level of cleanliness might sound a bit extreme, but if your home is messy or dirty, it will not show well. Buyers will not find messy or dirty homes attractive. If your house is spotless, this could function to help attract potential buyers.

Yes, we mentioned earlier why you should have your home deep cleaned. By deep cleaning we mean, that you or someone else is cleaning your home from top to bottom. You should be cleaning from the ceiling, ceiling fans and light fixtures in your ceilings, down to the mouldings, going down the walls, to the baseboards, and the floor.

Yes, it might sound extreme to clean your walls. But, cleaning your walls could help you to eliminate any scuffs or are areas that might have taken a beating over time. Sanitizing and thoroughly cleaning your home, is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways that you can get your home ready to sell.

When cleaning and sanitizing your home, consider clearing any clutter and unnecessary items from your countertops since this will help make space appear larger. You can make your home look cleaner by displaying clean, white, hand, and bath towels in your bathrooms. That cannot be stressed enough, but you need to have a clean kitchen and clean bathrooms, kitchens, and bathrooms that have the potential to make or break a sale. 

Modernize your home

Here is another important consideration; you will not get as much money for your home if it appears dated. You will be able to get more money for your home if it seems to be modern and updated. If you have not updated your home in many years, you should consider updating and modernizing your home wherever possible.

You do not need to spend a lot of money to make your home look more updated. You can do little things like changing the fixtures by replacing gold or brass fixtures to installations that are nickel, chrome, brushed silver, or stainless steel.

You can always buy stainless steel stick-on coverings or stainless steel appliance paints. That is if you want to efficiently and economically make appliances such as dishwashers or refrigerators appear new. Using stainless steel stick-on coverings or appliance paints will allow you to achieve a stainless steel look in your kitchen for a fraction of the price. 

When you are in your kitchen, you should be taking time to declutter cabinets drawers, and your oven if you are storing anything inside of your oven. It is essential to declutter these storage areas in your kitchen. Buyers will be looking inside every nook and cranny in your kitchen, and people can be nosy. You might consider removing any rugs in your kitchen to make it appear larger. 

Neutralize

You can make your home feel neutral by using a neutral colour scheme. That will help potential buyers to imagine themselves living in your home more quickly. It is crucial to have a neutral colour scheme in statement rooms such as the dining room or kitchen. You might consider adding lighting and emphasizing any natural light coming into your home using mirrors and subtle lamps.

You should consider adjusting any window treatments that you are using in your home, so they fit in with the ambiance you are trying to create. Any window treatments or curtains in your home should have neutral colours or subtle designs.

You might even consider adding sheer curtains because sheer curtains allow more light into a room which makes a place more attractive. Additionally, you should be positioning curtain rods as high as possible and using thinner curtain rods to maximize your space.

You might not already know this, but you can also use window treatments to help a room appear larger than it is. If you have a room with a low ceiling, you can add hanging drapes that go from the ceiling and extend down onto the floor on each side of the window frame. The effect that these long hanging drapes provide will help the windows to appear larger and the ceiling to appear taller. If you are considering doing this, you can consider using neutral coloured curtains with thin curtain rods.

How you can make specific spaces in your home more appealing

Closets

When working with closets, you would want to clear about half of the items in every wardrobe. Clearing half of the cabinet will ensure that buyers will have a better idea of how big the closets in your home are. If you can use matching hangers in your cupboards, this will make your closets have a stronger visual impact.

Bedrooms

You can make a bedroom more attractive for prospective buyers using a gender-neutral colour scheme in the room and with the rooms’ accessories. Adding a cohesive colour scheme (colour coordinating with the paint colours for the walls, headboard, bedspread, sheets, curtains etc.), a headboard and some items for decoration can make a bedroom more appealing and help create a specific mood.

Removing extraneous or unnecessary clutter such as office furniture, computers, televisions, power strips, etc. will help a bedroom to feel more welcoming and relaxing. When you walk into a bedroom you want to feel at home and relaxed. 

If you do not already have a headboard for a bedroom, it is recommendable that you consider adding a headboard. Adding a headboard is a relatively economical way to make a bedroom feel more sophisticated, and it will create a visual focal point for the room. Adding decorative items, mainly decorative items placed at eye level on a dresser will help you to add additional focal points in a bedroom.

Bathrooms

If the bathrooms in your home are looking at all stained, you need to clean them. Also, you must eliminate any unnecessary clutter from the bathrooms, so they are spotlessly clean and immaculate. 

There is a solution you can make to clean the bathroom walls if they are grimy. You make this solution using a mixture which contains one part bleach and one part water, you put it into a spray bottle and spray the bathroom walls. Then you wait a minute or two and wipe down the bathroom walls.

Make sure that if you are working any chemicals like bleach that you are wearing gloves and are in a well-ventilated area. You should take care to not touch your eyes or skin with the gloves you are wearing or anything with the bleach solution. After this, you can repaint the bathroom walls.

You can also create a solution using muriatic acid (which you can find at hardware stores) and ten parts water. You put this solution in a spray bottle, spray it on glass shower doors and rise this and the grime off, to clean shower doors. That should help make glass shower doors look like new and save you the trouble of replacing a glass shower door because it’s grimy.

Kitchen

Do not fret if your kitchen cabinets are showing their age. You can quickly refresh your kitchen cabinets without having to go out and buy new cabinets. You should be able to add a fresh coat of stain to your cabinets if they are stained or have the doors sanded down and repainted. That should cost you less than $300.

You can also swap outdated looking kitchen cabinet knobs, and drawer pulls, with newer brushed silver, chrome, or nickel knobs and drawer pulls. Buying new cabinet knobs and drawer pulls should not cost you a lot but will make your kitchen cabinets look refreshed and more modern.

Additionally, this should go without saying, but since prospective buyers will be peeking inside every single nook and cranny in your kitchen. Therefore, you should clean out and clean the inside of your refrigerator, cabinets, and oven.

You should also be going through and removing unnecessary clutter from kitchen cupboards, drawers, your refrigerator, oven, etc. You should clean your sink, floor, stove, and countertops, along with every other area of your kitchen. You want your kitchen to be spotless.

As mentioned earlier, be sure to remove any kitchen rugs, specifically any rugs by the kitchen sink. Kitchen rugs are often eye-catching and will break up space in the kitchen. As mentioned earlier, removing kitchen rugs will help you to make your kitchen feel spacious.

Dining Room

Your dining room should have a neutral colour scheme and feel neutral. Consider setting your dining room table to create a focal point in the place that might feel a bit empty once you have decluttered and de-personalized this space. You mustn’t do over the stage for the dining room by setting out every single piece of China you own when setting the dining room table.

If you have put any new leaves in the dining room table, you should remove them so you can maximize the space in this room. Consider adding a vase of fresh flowers to the dining room to create another focal point in the room.

Living Room

You want your living room to be bright, filled with light, and airy. You can make a living room feel brighter and feel bigger by raising any shades before buyers come to visit and by adding light coloured furniture. If you have a large or empty living room, you can consider adding strategically placed plants to create focal points that will draw the eye.

If you have hardwood floors in your living room or the rest of the home that need to be updated, you can consider only replacing the damaged floorboards. After replacing the broken floorboards, you can always make the rest of the floor match the new floorboards by sanding the floor and staining the deck using a hardwood floor stain. That can help you to save money since you are not removing and replacing a whole hardwood floor.

Which rooms in a home are the most important to stage when selling your home?

The following is a list of rooms that are ranked in order from most important to stage to least essential to stage when selling your home:

1. Living Room
2. Kitchen
3. Master Bedroom
4. Dining Room
5. Bathroom
6. Children’s Room
7. Guest Room

Related article: How much will home staging cost in Toronto? 

Conclusion

Hopefully, after reading this article, you will have gained greater insight. That is into how much you can expect to spend to get your home ready to sell in Toronto and Ontario. You have now tips and information for getting your home ready to sell no matter your budget. Putting in the work now before you put your home on the market to sell should help make it easier for you to sell your home.

Buyers want to see a home where they can imagine themselves living and building a life for themselves. While we might think that our homes would be appealing to almost anyone who comes through the front door, this might not be the case for buyers.

Your knick-knacks and personalized touches or family photos might make it more challenging for buyers to imagine themselves living in your home. In this situation, we need to consider what potential buyers want, what they are looking for in a new home, and how to make our space most attractive to them.

It is important to remember these things. The work you are putting into getting your home ready to sell is for potential buyers. That is so they will get excited about your home. Once you decide to list your home, you need to think like a seller instead of feeling like a homeowner.

So, if you are doing renovations, repairs, and other things to stage your home, you want to be thinking with a buyer in mind. You should remember to be economical. If you are successful, you will not be around that long to enjoy the benefits of the improvements that you have made for your home.

In other words, this is probably not the best time to install expensive custom cabinetry in your kitchen and bring in the top of the line appliances. You will want to be making smart and savvy improvements that will help add value to your home.

You want to be doing things that will have the best probability to increase your home’s sale price. Aim for the best return on your investment as possible. You can bring in the experts to provide you with some tips and feedback. Sometimes, you might be unsure about what you can do. In your specific case, to make your home more appealing to potential buyers.

For example, you can always consider having a stager visit your home for an initial assessment. The stager can provide you with feedback on how you can get the best stage for your home to sell. You can also consider asking the real estate agent or broker who will be representing you as the buyer to visit your home.

Remember this when the real estate agent or broker representing you as the seller is visiting your home. They can provide you with honest feedback about what you can reasonably do to get your home ready to sell. The real estate agent or broker representing you as the seller can also advise you on making any improvements. That will ensure that you get the best return on your investment.