An agent walked through a place at Corrimal and told the owner it needed a full repaint inside and out and a new kitchen before it went on the market. The owner rang me because that number was not happening and asked what he could get away with.
We walked it together. The kitchen was dated but sound. The paint was fine everywhere except a hallway and one bedroom wall. What the house actually had was a mouldy west wall, a driveway you could not see the concrete of, a front door that had not been touched in a decade, and a ridge line that looked like it had been through something. A day and a half of work, and it photographed like a different house.
I am not going to tell you agents are wrong. Some houses do need the big spend. But most pre-sale lists I get handed are sorted by what looks expensive rather than what a buyer actually reacts to, and those are not the same list.
Buyers price what they can see
That is the whole principle and everything below follows from it. A buyer standing on the footpath is doing arithmetic in their head, and they are not good at it. Every visible defect gets converted into a number that is bigger than the real fix, because they do not know what the real fix costs and they assume the worst. Green streaks down a wall become a rendering job. A wavy ridge line becomes a new roof.
So the money goes on the things that are cheap to fix and expensive to imagine. Not on the things that are expensive to fix and easy to ignore.
Start outside, because that is where the number gets set
The exterior wash does more per hour than anything else on this list, and it is not close. Walls, eaves, paths, driveway, fences, the bit of the roof you can see from the street. Mould and grime on a rendered or painted wall reads as neglect and it comes off with a soft wash. Same story with a driveway that has gone black.
Do this before you decide about painting rather than after, because a washed wall regularly turns out not to need paint at all. Washing first is the right order on any exterior repaint and it matters double when you are trying not to spend. Exterior cleaning is the cheapest visual change available to you and it is the one most people leave until last.
Then the roof, and specifically the ridge lines. Building inspectors photograph them and so do the drone shots that go in the listing. Cracked or missing pointing along a ridge is a repair; a buyer's report calling out "deteriorated ridge capping" is a negotiating lever, and they will use it for more than the repair is worth. Sort it before the photos rather than after the offer, and read the repointing or re-bedding post first so you know which of the two you are actually being quoted.
Gutters get cleared while somebody is up there. Overflow staining down a fascia is another one of those marks that reads as a much larger problem than it is.
Paint the parts people touch, not the whole house
A full interior repaint before sale is the default recommendation and it is usually the wrong one when the budget is tight.
What earns its money is the front door, the trim around it, and any wall carrying real damage. A front door in a current colour with the hardware cleaned or replaced changes the first ten seconds of every inspection. After that, patch and paint the walls that are marked and leave the ones that are not. Touch-ups blend on low-sheen if the existing paint has not yellowed, which is the same call landlords make between tenants.
The exception is colour. A house still in the beige it was painted in the 2000s reads as untouched to a buyer walking in, and there is no amount of cleaning that fixes a colour. If you are going to spend on paint anywhere, spend it there and skip somewhere else.
Wet areas: grout, silicone, and the tiles you can replace individually
Bathrooms are where buyers get nervous, and they get nervous about the wrong things. Discoloured grout and mouldy, shrunken silicone read as a leaking bathroom. Usually they are just old.
Regrouting and re-siliconing a shower is a day at most and it changes how the whole room photographs. Individual cracked or chipped tiles come out and get replaced without touching the rest of the wall. What does not make sense before a sale is a full retile, because that is a renovation and you will not get it back. Where the line falls between the two is the whole subject of the regrout or retile post, and the honest answer is that it depends on whether the waterproofing behind the tiles has failed. If it has, you are disclosing a problem rather than hiding one, which is the next thing worth getting straight.
Fixing is not the same as hiding
Worth saying plainly. NSW requires a seller to disclose any known issues with the property, such as defects or encumbrances, and a building and pest inspection is going to find the structural stuff regardless of what has been painted over.
So the pre-sale list is presentation and genuine repair, not concealment. Cover a damp patch and you have bought yourself a failed inspection and a buyer who now distrusts everything else in the house. If something turns out to be real, get it fixed properly or price the house with it in view.
The punch list nobody notices until it is gone
This is the part that costs almost nothing and does more than people credit, because these are the items a buyer physically interacts with during an inspection.
Doors that do not latch or that stick. Handles and knobs that turn loosely. Windows that will not slide. Missing or torn flyscreens, which are the single cheapest thing in a house to fix and the one buyers comment on most. A gate that drags. Skirting that has pulled away from the wall. Blinds with a cord that has knotted or a slat out. Light switches with cracked plates, though that one goes to an electrician rather than us.
None of it is individually worth a call-out, which is exactly why it never gets done. Batch it. Write the list as you walk the house pretending to be a buyer, then get it all done in one visit. That batching is most of the value in property maintenance work and it is the same logic that makes a vacancy week cheap.
Outside, the yard gets a mow, an edge, and a prune of anything blocking the front of the house or a window. Fresh mulch on the beds is close to free and photographs like effort.
Where the make-good version differs
The same list runs at the end of a lease, but the standard is different and it is worth knowing which one you are working to.
Selling is presentation, so you fix what a buyer will react to. Make-good is a legal comparison against the condition report, and the test is fair wear and tear rather than tidiness. NSW is specific about it: on the fair wear and tear page, faded, chipped or cracked paint is fair wear and tear, while an unapproved, poor quality paint job is damage. Same wall, opposite outcomes, and the difference is who did what to it.
Which means a landlord chasing bond has a narrower list than a seller chasing a price, and a tenant repainting a wall to be helpful can end up on the wrong side of it. If you are in that situation, work off the ingoing report rather than off what looks tired.
What to skip
New kitchen. New bathroom. Anything that needs a licensed trade you were not already going to spend on. Anything valued over the general building work threshold, which puts it into a different licensing conversation entirely and out of what we take on.
And anything a buyer will replace anyway. Nobody is paying more for a new benchtop in a kitchen they intend to pull out.
If you have got an agent's list and you want to know which half of it is real, send it through with a few photos of the outside. I will tell you what I would do first and what I would leave.
Want a hand with this at your place? Get a free quote or call 0450 959 936.