How to Get the Highest Price For Your Home For Sale in Toronto

For most people, buying a home is the single biggest investment you’ll make in your life, and selling that house might just be the biggest payoff. Any homeowner wants to get the most value out of their house, but it might seem impossible to push the price even a few digits higher. Anyone looking for homes for sale in Toronto is dealing with a highly competitive market, and it can take a lot of work to make your property stand out from the rest. Follow these 5 tips for getting the highest price for your home and your investment will pay off in spades.

home for sale

1 Fix your House Up

Sometimes the little details really matter. Putting a few hundred dollars towards a new coat of paint, repairing that broken door knob, and replacing those burnt out lightbulbs can make a big difference, not just in the value of your home, but how long it will sit on the market.

Curb appeal should be at the very forefront of your mind when thinking about adding value to your home. You want potential home buyers (and appraisers) to arrive at your house for a tour and see it at its best. The appraisers might add a few more thousand onto your home’s price, and the buyers might be halfway towards making their decision before even stepping through the door.

Fix up the inside too. Getting the walls repainted is a chore, but it can go a long way to making your home more marketable. Just be sure to paint a few weeks before putting your home on the market, as you don’t want people to tour your house when it’s full of that fresh paint smell. New flooring can also add major value to your home, especially if your current flooring is past its prime. This might seem like a larger investment than repainting, but the value it will add to your home is more than worth it.

2 Modernize Your Home

Clean renewable energy is a major selling point for any house for sale on the market these days. When living in Toronto, energy bills in the summer and the winter can be a major pain to your bank account. Investing in giving your home a modern energy saving system should be something you focus on regardless of whether you’re selling your home or not, but doing so before putting your home on the market will pay off once you sell.

In Toronto, insulation is key. Keep the heat out during the summer and in during the winter. Consider replacing your windows with higher grade double panes if you haven’t already, and make sure your roof is well insulated.

You can modernize other parts of your house as well. Consider getting electric locks for your door, along with motion sensing lights and a home security system. These investments will set you back a few hundred dollars each, but could add thousands to your home’s value over time.

3 Add On To Your House

Nothing will add more value to your home than increasing your square footage. Whether it be an expanded porch, a finished basement or attic space, or even an additional room, more floor space is a sure way of putting tens of thousands of more dollars onto the price of your home. These additions are, of course, a lot of work, and can take years to accomplish, but the ROI for this kind of work is higher than any other method of adding value to your home.

If you can add another bedroom to your home by finishing your basement, do it. If you can turn that ½ bathroom into a full, do it. Making these additions can put several hundred thousands of dollars onto the value of your home, just through a few years of hard work, patience, and dedication.

Plenty of people flip homes as part of their living, but you don’t have to look at owning and selling your home this way. Spending ten years or so making slow, gradual changes and improvements to your house is a fantastic way to get to know your home better and, whenever you decide to sell, you’ll take far more equity with you than what you started out with.

4 The “when” is most important

When appraisers come to assess the value of your house, they’ll do two things. They’ll take a look at your property, make sure it’s not falling apart, and get an idea for the soundness of its structure and the general details. Then they’ll compare it to other similar houses in your area. These comparisons, or “comps”, play a huge role in determining the price of your house.

So take a look at what the other houses in your area are going for. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to check your local Board of Realtors website and see if you can find data on the home prices month-to-month. Watch the trends. Waiting for the right moment to put your house on the market is almost as important as anything else you might do to increase the value. Work closely with your agent to make sure you optimize your timing as much as possible.

5 Take good pictures of your home

If you’re listing your home online (of course you are) you’ll want to include as many pictures as possible. With a cursory glance at the listing price, the majority of homebuyers make their decision based on their first impressions of what they see. If they like what they see, you have a great chance of selling your home, if they don’t, not so much.

Hire a professional photographer to take pictures of your home. As great as you think you might be with your iPhone, there really is no comparison to what a skilled photographer can do by manipulating the light, staging each shot, and taking the highest quality pictures possible with a great camera. Go look at any real estate listing page and what do you see? Pictures. Pictures might not increase the value of your home per se, but they will keep you from biting your nails week to week wondering if anyone is actually going to buy the house that you’ve spent so much time and money trying to sell for the highest price.


Read More:

What to consider if you’re selling a home for the first time

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