In the UK at the end of 2021, it feels like the housing market is in favour of those who wish to sell their home.  And while the Internet gives lots of general information about selling, I have struggled to find articles or videos that explain a step by step process for selling. So here is my attempt at documenting what we’re doing to prepare our house to put it on the market to sell. 

Of course, the house hasn’t sold yet, so whether these are the correct steps remains to be seen. We’ll update this article if, while it’s for sale, we learn anything new that we should have done to prepare.

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Here’s a summary

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Before deciding to sell…

Live in your home as if you will move someday

From the time that you first move into your first, own home, you should treat it as if you’ll move out of it someday.

I know this could be a bit contentious, afterall, having just gone through the rigours of moving into your dream home, the last thing you want to do is move again.  I get it.  And I’m not suggesting that the move is going to be in the next 5, 10 or even 20 years.  But, do you honestly believe that your dream home will still meet your needs if, say, you end up with four children living under your roof?  Or, if, God forbid, you have an accident and need medical assistance adaptations?

And, perhaps the street parking arrangement doesn’t bother you because you can walk to work and don’t need a car, but what if you get a new job at a different company someday?

To keep you living in your home as if you might move someday, here are some tips based on our experience:

• Treat your down-payment like the rental deposit that you’ll only get back if you treat the house well.
• Treat your monthly mortgage payment like a rental payment that will increase annually – even if you’re in a fixed term mortgage, you can use an annual increase to help pay off more of the capital, or you can use it to save up for any home improvements you need or want.  We were really fortunate because we were able to pay off our mortgage in 17 years because we worked hard to overpay whenever we could, and we refinanced regularly as the interest rates and our fixed term mortgage promotions ended.  And we did this without skimping on regular international holidays each year and lots of home improvements over those years.
• Be a tough landlord with yourself.  If something in your home breaks, get it fixed and don’t let it linger.  Stuff that lingers starts to make your home shabby which decreases its potential value.
• Be careful how you fill your home.  We all have hobbies, things that spark joy.  Perhaps it’s reading from physical books, or collecting DVDs, or sewing, or handbags, or jewellery or clothes.  Remember that literally every item you bring into your home not only needs a place to be stored in your home but will also have to be moved out again someday.

Make sympathetic home improvements

If you love hot fuchsia pink, or if you’re painting it in your daughter’s room because that’s her chosen colour, just be mindful that if you end up moving and you want the top selling price, you may need to re-paint before the photographer comes. Because, if potential buyers see that they need to re-paint before they move in, they may not arrange a viewing. And, if they do come and visit, despite the colour scheme and make an offer, they may use the colour scheme as an excuse to make a reduced offer since to them, the room is not “move in ready.”

I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t use hot fuchsia pink if that is what brings joy, but consider using it on just one wall of the room and coordinating the colours around a scheme, rather than on every wall of the room. Or, consider a more neutral wall colour and stick the bright pink on your accents and soft furnishings.

And prioritise the home improvements that will make life in your home easier and more bearable, not just cosmetically pleasing.  One of the improvements we had added was a tumble dryer vent in our kitchen.  Prior to that, we had to put the dryer vent hose out the kitchen window whenever we wanted to use the dryer (or just suffer the condensation of venting into the kitchen on rainy days).  Reconfiguring our kitchen to vent the dryer outside was one of the best improvements we could have made.

I have to thank my Dad for this tip; he made (or suggested) most of the subtle improvements that have made our house not only a joy to live in, but also more sellable, all these decades later.

Strike a balance between needs and wants

Deciding to sell

Hopefully, many years from when you first move into your home, the time will come when your housing needs change, which will prompt the decision to sell.  There are so many reasons for selling and there may be several things that happen all together that prompt the decision.  Here were our reasons for selling:

• We had paid off the mortgage
• We both stopped working corporate 9-5 jobs
• So, we no longer needed easy access to London
• We wanted more land to have bigger gardens and animals
• We wanted a specific parking space/driveway
• And we foresaw the need to be closer to family for future carer responsibilities

We love our house.  We’ve made it our favourite place in the world to be, and if we could pick up the entire thing and move it to a more perfect location, that would be our ideal.  But since it is mid-terraced and our more perfect location is in a completely different country, selling was the only option for us.

We made our decision to sell in July 2021.  That is when the rest of the process below kicked into action.

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Set a target moving month

When would you realistically like to be out of your current home and living in a new place?  Notice I didn’t say ideally.  It’s really important that you be realistic with yourself.  It’s important to work toward a moving goal, but it’s equally important to give yourself an achievable target, and don’t get too frustrated or upset if the goal changes… that’s life, and it’s all part of the experience.

When we set our target, we considered a few things:

• I knew that I didn’t want the pressure of moving while I was working, so we agreed we wouldn’t put the house on the market until a month before my last day of work.
• I assumed that the shortest period between agreeing an offer and “closing” was 6 weeks.  Of course, it could be longer than this so I also built in some extra.
• The extra I built in was the time around Christmas.  I knew that neither we, nor our buyers would probably want to move at the end of December. 
• So, I assumed a moving date of mid to end January 2022 as the earliest moving month.
• I then built in various contingencies in case we couldn’t leave for the States immediately after moving out.  So, our plan between January and March is to live with my in-laws so that we can get all our UK affairs re-directed back to that address as our UK residence.  We’ll be okay with the rough timeline I’ve created even if the house sale takes a month or so longer, but if we have to re-plan, that’s not the end of the world either.

We also know that we want to go back to the States and try to establish gardens at our new property. That means getting seedlings started which really needs to happen in March or April if they’re going to be ready for planting by the end of May which is when stuff usually goes into the ground in our new area.

Perhaps your timeline will revolve around your kid’s school schedules, or the start of a new job. All good things to consider when setting your target move date.

Start the clear-out

No matter how well you did living minimally in your home, inevitably you probably expanded your stuff to fill your space.  You have furniture and clothing and décor and kitchen appliances and hobbies.  Everything in your home will either have to be kept, re-sold, given away or scrapped, and it will take time to decide into which of these four piles each item will land. Read more about our adventure clearing out our home.

We recommend that you give yourself A LOT of time for this step.  We had 4 months of this before we engaged an estate agent, but we wish we’d have taken more time for this OR, that we’d been more serious about it from the start.

Here’s our “4-pile method” for clearing a house

The scrap pile

The tip, the local civil amenities site, the dump, the rubbish… no matter what you call it, inevitably there will be some items that no one else wants at the point where you want to be rid of it. In which case, you have two options: keep it and move it to your new home, or throw it away.

We ended up taking van-loads of stuff to the local tip to clear it out of the house ahead of our photography session, and we’ll probably have further loads as we get closer to moving.

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In our research (google searches) there seemed to be two types of estate agents: 

• Online agents who charge a set menu of fees for their services that you will have to pay whether or not your house sells;
• Commission-based agents who only get paid if they sell your home, but they get a %age of whatever your home is sold for, so if they get a 1% commission, then they get £4,000 if they sell your house for £400k. 

There will be pros and cons for each of these methods and you’ll ultimately need to decide which provides you the best service to meet your personal needs. For us, the “one stop shop” approach of Purplebricks, an online agency, really appealed. It just felt very straightforward and easy.

Make sure that you check what are all the services that each estate agent provides in their standard commission and what incurs an extra charge. Our agent had a clear list of what their set fee covered and what would have to be purchased additionally. Here are the things we were interested in:

• Hosted home visits: With our two dogs, we knew that at least one of us would have to take the dogs out whenever a home viewing was scheduled and we didn’t like the idea of just one of us then having to host people in our home. So we were really pleased to find out that our estate agent had a set fee for hosting the home visits without us needing to be around at all.
• For Sale signage: Our estate agent includes this in the standard property listing fee.
• Internet listings: Again, as an online agency, this is part of the standard property listing fee. You can pay more for a premium or featured listing on the sites. We will consider this later if we really need to to sell the house.
• 360 degree video tour: With Covid lock-downs, a video like this is essential so that people can get a good feel for the place even if they can’t physically visit. We got the video as part of the upgraded package that included the hosted home visits.

Instruct your agent and find a solicitor

After your interview with the agent, they’ll give you a report about their research into your property and the local area, as well as their recommendation about the value of your property.  If you are happy to proceed with them, then you’ll need to sign a contract with them.  This lays out what they’ll do for you, what you’ll need to pay them, how and by when, as well as lots of other details.

The “instructing” part is all about confirming the details of the listing, filling out a seller’s report, organising the energy performance certification survey as well as the floorplan detail, the photography, and confirming who you’ll use as a solicitor for the sale.

When we instructed our agent, we paid the extra £500 for some good value extra services this provided:

• Our agent, or her assistant will manage all the home viewings, however many that is – we don’t have to be here when the potential buyers criticise our home décor choices and, because they have to be here, they’ll make sure that the viewings are scheduled as efficiently as possible.
• And the photographer will provide a 3D video tour of our house, so if Covid drives the UK into another lock-down, people can still get a feel for it, virtually.

The extra cost that we didn’t instruct was making the house a premium or featured listing on the websites.  We decided this wasn’t necessary because we’re not competing with a lot of other properties in our area right now.

• Replacing the carpets (because our puppies had accidents while potty training last year)
• Doing some touch-up filling and painting around the windows that had been replaced a few years ago
• Adding some skirting board that was missing following our kitchen remodel
• Adding a sliding door to the office – we never replaced the door when the office was installed in 2019 because a traditional door wouldn’t have worked, so we finally “finished” the room with a barn-style sliding door

All of these improvements combined came it at less than £1,000 and they mean that potential buyers won’t have these as reasons to nit pick over the price we’re asking.

Arrange the energy performance certificate (EPC)

Although we could have tried to source this separately, and probably paid a bit less than we did, we arranged our EPC directly through our estate agent (The set fee for this from Purplebricks was around £80).  This made it easy because then the surveyor was chased by our estate agent, and his report will be provided directly to our estate agent to get added to our home listing, without us having to manage those logistics.  Easy.

All homes in the UK need to have an EPC in order to be sold.  This is a grade for how energy efficient your home is, similar to how major appliances all have a grade for how efficient they are.

Double-glazing, loft insulation, cavity wall insulation, a new boiler or heat pump… these are the things that the surveyor is looking for when they give you a grade.  The energy performance certificate is valid for 10 years, although if you do any improvement works, you may want to renew the certificate as part of your house sale.  An EPC wasn’t required when we moved into our house in 2003, so we’d never had one done before, but it was pretty painless.  The surveyor came, took measurements, checked the windows, the boiler, the radiators and the loft and was finished in about a half hour.

Agree your house advert with your estate agent

After the photography is finished, your estate agent will convert the images, the video and her research about the area into the advertising page for your property.  You know your property better than your agent, so work with them to make it as accurate and pleasing as you can, making sure that the good parts of your property are highlighted.

I wanted to make sure that it clearly highlights:

• that the front of our house faces a communal square
• that we have a south-facing back garden with back-gate access for bicycles and scooter/moped
• that we are an easy walk from a Crossrail station with half-hourly access to/from London and Reading
• that we are a safe, easy walk to Kennedy Park with its dog-walking field, walking trails, out-door fitness park, allotments and shops.

I think our advert accomplished this. You can check it out on Zoopla, Rightmove, or Purplebricks.

Be mindful of dates that you’ll be away on holiday.  Unless you are going to trust the agent with keys to your property while you’re away in case viewings need to be scheduled. And consider times like birthdays and Christmas when you may have more clutter around the house than normal.  Because we didn’t get the house on the market by the 1^st of November like we’d originally planned, we moved our listing date to 26^th December, right after Christmas, instead of putting it on the market before the holiday.

Our estate agent advised us that it’s not smart for your house to be on the market for a long time because then potential buyers assume that you’ll be more desperate to sell and will therefore accept a lower offer.  It seemed like good, sensible advice to us, even if the market right now is more of a seller’s market.

One other consideration, is to look out for what other houses are available for sale in your area at the time. If everyone is selling up in an area, potential buyers may be wary of what is causing everyone to sell. It may just be a coincidence, but seeing lots of sale signs in an area means more competition for buyers, so if you can hold onto the property a few months more, you might want to do so.

I’ve not really seen this mentioned in any of the research that I’ve done for selling my house, but it’s something I’ve done to help Wera when she is hosting viewings for us. When I worked a 9-5 job, my passion was documentation, so a house FAQ really plays to my strengths. 

I thought about the quirks and features of the house that I might wonder and ask about if I were viewing the property that only the owner would probably know the answer to, such as:

• How is the house situated?
• What are the neighbours like?
• What’s the public transportation like?
• What fixtures and fittings will be left with the house?
• Is any of the furniture for sale?
• What is the broadband speed?
• Where is the stop cock?
• Where is the telephone master socket?
• Is there a security system in the house?
• When are the dust bins collected?
• Do you have a smart meter?
• Do you have a water meter?
• Where are the gas and electric meters?
• Where are the shut-off switches for the kitchen appliances?
• Are there any warranties remaining for any of the fixtures and fittings?
• When were the various home improvements done in the house?
• Do you have a specific parking space in the communal parking area?
• Who is responsible for maintaining the front garden?
• Who is responsible for maintaining the fences in the back garden?
• Why is there a hose connector tap under the downstairs bathroom sink?
• I don’t see any radiators downstairs, how is it heated?
• How do you open the awning on the back of the house?
• What is the wire running down the corner in the master bedroom?
• Why is there ceramic tiling on the wall under the stairs?
• Why is the wall under the stairs such a different colour from the rest of the house?
• Is the shed in the back garden staying?

I also still have all the paperwork from when we bought the house back in 2003, like the agent’s advert, the house survey, the land registry searches, etc.  I’ve put these together in a file for the estate agent to have to hand for the viewings in case prospective buyers want some foresight from these, and, of course, it will be useful to have as a “welcome pack” for the new owners.

Do you have any advice that you would share with someone who is preparing to sell their house for the first time?  What are your memories of selling your home?  Please share your insights, hints, tips and questions with us, below.

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