Selling Your Home While You Live There: Strategies For Minimal Disruption

Selling your home while you are living in it requires three things of equal importance: planning, strategy and patience.

When you’re selling a home in Adelaide, buying another one and moving house, stress levels are high! And it starts with trying to present a ‘show home’ property to the market while your family is still living there. Here’s how to minimise the stress and the disruption and save your sanity:

1. Start with a list of the tasks that need to be done before your home can be listed for sale. This should include decluttering, depersonalising, repairs, general maintenance, gardening and deep cleaning.
2. Organise what you need to achieve those tasks. That might be sourcing packing boxes, hiring a trailer for a visit to the dump, renting a mini skip, renting a storage unit (or finding somewhere for off-site storage such as a friend or relative’s garage), hiring tradespeople, and booking professional cleaners such as carpet or window cleaners.
3. Work your way through those tasks until your home is clutter-free, depersonalised, repaired and top-to-bottom clean – at which point it is ready for buyer inspections.

1. Ask your agent to market the home using high quality photos, drone shots and video to help reduce the number of open home attendees to serious buyers only.
2. Discuss whether private inspections or open home inspections will work best for you. Work with your agent to schedule inspections at times that are easiest for you and your family. Consider Saturday or Sunday afternoons if you need weekend mornings to get the house tidy. Or, if your weekends are busy, schedule weekday evening inspections on scheduled days off.
3. Buy baskets or boxes for ‘quick storage’ solutions prior to inspections and have your pre-inspection tidy-up drills mapped out, e.g. baskets in the kids’ bedrooms for loose items, a box designated for bathroom paraphernalia to be stashed inside the vanity, a marked box for dirty laundry to be loaded into the car.
4. One family member in charge of putting pets and their beds and bowls into the car just before you leave.
5. Stash sensitive and valuable items such as jewellery or personal documents in a designated bag and take it with you.

1. For the duration of the marketing campaign, implement daily cleanup schedules for each family member. Tidying and cleaning for a few minutes each day eliminates the stress of a major cleanup at open inspection time.
2. Plan simple one-pot meals, use the BBQ, or book a home delivery meal service such as HelloFresh or Marley Spoon to minimise kitchen disruption.
3. Plan family outings (including the pets) for scheduled inspection times. Distracting yourselves with a family activity outside of the home will help reduce your stress levels.
4. Discuss a long settlement period with your agent, lessening the pressure of finding a new home while simultaneously selling yours.

Our friendly real estate agents in Adelaide’s north and northeast suburbs can provide you with more great advice on maximising your home’s sale prospects while you’re still living in the home. Pop in and see us or give us a call!