Guides / Selling
What actually adds value before you sell — and what's a waste of money
There's a short list of things worth doing before you market a property, and a much longer list of things people do anyway.
6 min read
The confusion comes from mixing up two different questions. 'What adds value to my home?' is a question about living in it for ten years. 'What adds value before I sell?' is a question about the next eight weeks. The answers are almost opposites.
Worth doing
| Job | Rough cost | Why it pays |
|---|---|---|
| Full repaint, neutral | £2,800–£9,000 | Changes every photograph and every viewing |
| Snagging the small faults | £600–£1,800 | Removes the 'not looked after' impression |
| Carpet and floor cleaning | £400–£1,000 | Cheap, and smell matters more than people admit |
| Garden tidy | £600–£1,600 | Fixes the first and last photo in the listing |
| Deep clean before photos | £600–£1,200 | Makes everything else look deliberate |
Usually not worth doing
- A new kitchen. £24,000 spent, rarely £24,000 back, and a third of buyers would have chosen differently.
- A new bathroom, unless the existing one is genuinely unusable.
- New windows purely for the sale.
- Landscaping. Tidy beats designed when you're selling.
- Smart-home gadgets, which buyers discount entirely.
The exception: the deal-breaker repair
If something will show up on a survey and stop a sale — active damp, a failing roof, dangerous wiring — fix it or price for it. Those aren't presentation problems, and no amount of paint helps.
Presentation spend has a ceiling. Past that ceiling you're buying someone else's taste with your money.
A simple rule
If a buyer would notice it in the first thirty seconds of a viewing, or in a listing photograph, spend on it. If they'd only notice it after they've moved in, leave it for them.
The Presentable way
We do all of the above as one job: painting, small repairs, carpets, garden tidy and a deep clean, for one fixed price, finished in less than two weeks.