The Real Estate Professor — Free Tools
Pre-Sale Repair Cost Estimator
People like clean, not new
Before you spend a dollar preparing a home for sale, sort every item onto my decision ladder: cheap and high-impact — do it. Expensive but contained — judgment call. Expensive and sprawling — credit at closing. Check the items that apply to your house below; the prices are honest working ranges from my own jobs — adjust any number to your local bids and watch the total.
How to use the ladder
The green DO IT items are the whole secret: your target is moving condition — clean, bright, worry-free. Not a renovation. Not a showpiece. What people love most about new construction is consistency, and a whole-house repaint delivers that feeling in a thirty-year-old home. The CREDIT items are there because some repairs are price-prohibitive or sprawling — a tile run from the foyer through the kitchen can't be patched, and an aging-but-dry roof gets disclosed and priced, not replaced. Let the buyer's inspector find what they'll find; your job is to remove fear from what's visible.
And the biggest money-saver on this whole page is the item that isn't on it: the pre-sale kitchen remodel. Don't. Buyers who want a new kitchen will build it their way and adjust the offer. Remember the $50,000 kitchen that wasn't.