SELLING IN BC

What to fix before you sell, and what to leave alone

Fix the small things a buyer would write down as jobs: marked walls, dated switches, drips, sticking doors, a tired front entry. Leave the big renovations alone. The expensive items, like a roof, a furnace or old plumbing, you either disclose and price for, or fix only when a buyer’s lender or insurer will force the issue anyway.

That’s the short version. Here’s how I make the call in a real house.

The test I use

Walk through your home the way a buyer does on a second showing, with a notepad. Every time they’d write something down, that’s money coming off their offer. Buyers don’t price a $300 job at $300. They price it at what it would cost them to deal with it, plus the hassle, plus a bit more for whatever else they think might be wrong.

So the question for each item is simple: does it cost less to fix it now than a buyer will knock off for it? For small, visible jobs the answer is almost always yes. For big jobs it’s almost always no.

Fix these

Anything that looks like neglect. A dripping tap, a running toilet, a cracked outlet cover, a door that won’t latch. None of them matter on their own. Together they tell a buyer the house hasn’t been looked after, and they start wondering what they can’t see.

Walls and trim. Patch the holes, touch up the scuffs, and repaint any room in a strong colour. Paint is the cheapest way to make a room photograph well and show well.

Dated electrical trim. Old almond switches and outlets with yellowed covers date a whole house. Swapping them to modern white ones is a small job for an electrician and it changes how every room reads.

Light fixtures that date the room. Not every fixture. The ones in the entry, kitchen and main living area that a buyer sees first.

Caulking and grout. Fresh caulk around tubs, showers and kitchen sinks. Mouldy or cracked caulk makes a buyer think about water damage, even when there isn’t any.

The front entry. The front door, the house numbers, the light beside it and the walk up to it. It’s the first photo and the first thing a buyer touches.

The mechanical basics. I spent six years as a journeyman HVAC technician before I got into real estate, so this one’s personal. Get the furnace and air conditioner serviced, change the filter, and keep the receipt. A recent service record answers a question every inspector is going to raise.

Skip these

Big renovations right before listing. A new kitchen or a full bathroom gut costs real money and takes weeks or months. You also pick the finishes, and the buyer may not like them. In most cases you’re better off pricing the home for what it is and letting the buyer renovate to their own taste.

Projects that don’t match the rest of the house. A new deck on a home with a 1990s kitchen doesn’t lift the price. Buyers price a home by its weakest major room.

Personal-taste upgrades. Built-ins, feature walls, specialty lighting. They matter to you. They rarely move a buyer’s number.

New flooring you don’t need. If the floors are worn and dated, buyers will notice. But many buyers plan to replace flooring anyway, so a professional clean or a refinish often does the job for a fraction of the cost. Carpet that holds pet or smoke smell is the exception. Replace it.

Disclose or price these

Some items are too big to fix for a sale and too important to ignore. The roof near the end of its life. A furnace or hot water tank that’s original to the house. Poly-B plumbing. Foundation cracks. These don’t belong on a weekend to-do list. They belong in the pricing and the disclosure.

Here’s why that matters. In BC, a seller has to disclose a known hidden defect that makes the home dangerous or unfit to live in. Beyond that, a problem a buyer discovers after you’ve agreed on a price is the one that costs you the most, because it lands when they have the most leverage. A problem they know about before they write the offer gets priced in once.

If your home has polybutylene pipe, read what Poly-B actually does to a sale, because the insurance side matters more than the pipe. And for what buyers can do when an inspection turns something up, here’s how backing out after a home inspection works in BC.

What about a pre-listing inspection?

Sometimes it’s worth it. On an older home, or one with a history you’re unsure of, it tells you what a buyer’s inspector will find before they find it. Then you choose: fix it, disclose it, or price for it. Most BC buyers will still do their own inspection, so it doesn’t replace theirs. What it changes is that nothing in their report surprises you.

On a newer home in good condition, it’s usually not needed.

Staging and cleaning come first

Before any of the fixes above, declutter and clean. It costs the least and it changes how buyers see every room. In the National Association of REALTORS® 2025 Profile of Home Staging (the latest edition as of November 2026), a survey of US agents, decluttering (91%) and cleaning the whole home (88%) were the two things sellers’ agents recommended most.

How I decide in your house

Every house is different, so I’d rather walk it with you than hand you a generic list. When I come through for a home evaluation, I go room by room and sort everything into three piles: fix it, skip it, or disclose and price it. You get a written list with a rough cost on each item, and you decide what to do. I’ll also connect you with the trades I use if you want quotes.

The full checklist I bring to that visit is on how to sell your home for more. It covers the prep, the photos and the launch, as well as the fixes.