How to prepare your home for sale

If you're thinking about selling your home, you've probably already started wondering which updates are worth doing. Paint the walls? Replace the flooring? Stage the whole place? Tackle the kitchen?

The common advice — paint, clean, declutter, do some landscaping — isn't wrong. But it's incomplete. Getting a home truly market-ready means knowing which improvements to prioritize, how to sequence them, and how to work with your agent to make the most of what you spend.

Get the prep right and the data shows it pays off significantly. Get it wrong, or skip it entirely, and buyers will notice. When buyers notice problems, they don't just deduct the repair cost. They add a hassle premium on top of it.

Where to focus your prep

Not every upgrade is worth doing before a sale. Some high-cost renovations rarely return what they cost at closing. Others, often the simplest ones, return several times their investment.

The highest-returning improvements tend to be things like a professional deep clean, fresh interior paint, staging, and curb appeal work. But the specifics matter: which rooms to prioritize, what level of update makes sense for your price point, and where buyers in your market are most likely to push back during inspection.

A $300 vanity light can make a bathroom feel ten years newer. Refacing cabinets and swapping hardware can remove a buyer's biggest reason to negotiate down on the kitchen. Small, well-chosen updates consistently outperform bigger renovations in terms of what they return at closing.

How to sequence it and who to involve

Most sellers underestimate how long good prep actually takes. High-impact work like painting, flooring, and staging needs time to be done properly, and rushing it shows. Most sellers need at least 60 days of runway before they're ready to list.

Your agent should be part of this process from the beginning, not just at the end. A good pre-listing strategy session means walking the home together, identifying the improvements most likely to move your sale price, and building a pricing strategy around the work you're doing. There are specific questions worth asking before you sign a listing agreement, and red flags that are easy to miss if you don't know what to look for.

Figure out how to fund it

Even sellers who know exactly what to do often hit a wall when it comes to paying for it. There's a lot in motion during a home sale: moving costs, the next down payment, carrying costs on the property you're still showing. Writing a big check for prep before you've seen a dollar from the sale isn't always practical.

With Notable's pay-at-close program, eligible sellers can fund staging, painting, landscaping, flooring, repairs, and more, then repay from their sale proceeds at closing. No monthly payments, no upfront cost, no credit score impact to apply.

Sellers have also used Notable funds for things that come up unexpectedly: pre-listing inspections, pest control, temporary housing during showings, and emergency repairs during escrow. The full list of what's covered might surprise you.

There's a lot that goes into a successful home sale, and the sellers who come out ahead are the ones who go in with a plan. If you're getting ready to list, we put together a free guide that covers everything: the top improvements ranked by ROI, a room-by-room checklist, a full 60-day pre-listing timeline, and a closer look at how pay-at-close financing works.

Download the free guide →