Selling a home, stage by stage
Transaction mechanics ยท sequence
Almost every decision that determines how a sale goes is taken before a single buyer sees the property. Once it is exposed, the seller's remaining choices are mostly responses. This is the opposite of how selling is usually imagined, and it explains why the weeks before listing matter more than the weeks after.
Assess the condition honestly, in writing
The useful first step is to walk the property as a stranger would and write down what a stranger would notice. Owners stop seeing their own house after about a year of living in it; the marked door, the tap that has to be turned a particular way, the room that is used as storage. Some of these are worth fixing and some are not, but none of them can be judged until they are written down.
Price from evidence rather than from a target
A price is a claim about comparable evidence, and the market answers the claim within a few weeks. The evidence that counts is what similar properties nearby actually completed at recently, adjusted for the ways they differ. Evidence that does not count includes what a neighbour is currently asking, what the property would have fetched at some previous point, and what the household needs in order for its next move to work.
Prepare only what changes a decision
Preparation work divides cleanly into work that removes an objection and work that adds a feature. The first is usually worth doing and the second usually is not. Repairing a visible defect removes a reason to hesitate. Renewing a kitchen shortly before selling replaces the buyer's own choice with the seller's, and buyers rarely pay the full cost of a choice they did not make.
Understand that exposure is a one-off event
A property gets the most attention it will ever receive in its first fortnight, because everyone already looking sees it at once. That attention cannot be recreated later. A property listed before it is ready spends its best fortnight being seen at its worst, and a price correction made a month afterwards is addressed to a much smaller audience.
Compare offers as complete propositions
Offers should be compared on four axes at once: the figure, the conditions attached, the timetable and the demonstrated ability to complete. An offer that is higher but conditional on a chain of other events is not straightforwardly better than a lower one that is not. The right question is not which offer is largest but which is most likely to become a completed sale on an acceptable date.
Manage the contingency period rather than waiting through it
After acceptance the buyer is verifying, and each verification is a point at which the agreement can be reopened. A seller who has already obtained their own information about the building's condition is in a much stronger position at this stage, because they are responding to a report they can evaluate rather than to one they are seeing for the first time under time pressure.
Treat repair negotiation as a valuation question
When an inspection produces requests, the productive frame is not fairness but arithmetic: what would it cost, and what would it cost to find another buyer and start again. Those two figures decide the answer. Long lists of small items are usually best answered as a single sum rather than item by item, which turns an argument about twenty things into a decision about one.
Prepare for closing as an administrative event
The last stage is documentary. The items that hold sales up are almost always paperwork rather than disagreement: an unreleased lien from a loan long since repaid, an heir whose signature is needed, an association certificate that takes longer to obtain than anyone allowed for. Every one of these is discoverable early, and every one of them is far cheaper to resolve before it is on the critical path.
The empty-house question
Whether to sell before buying is the one genuinely difficult decision in the sequence, and it has no general answer. Selling first produces certainty about the sum available and removes the risk of carrying two properties, at the cost of possibly needing somewhere to live in between. Buying first removes that gap at the cost of exposure to a sale that may take longer than expected.
The variable that decides it is the market's own speed. In a market where properties transact quickly, the gap is short and the risk of carrying two is small. In a slow market the same choice can be expensive. Anyone offering a universal rule here is not describing the mechanics.