Get Your Home Ready to Sell, Printable Checklist

Updated 04/2025.

Preparing to sell your home takes time and involves many moving parts. Plenty of factors influence whether or not a home sells and how long it takes, so many that it can be hard to remember them all. 

A checklist of action items for preparing your home for sale is a big help. Below you will find a list of interior and exterior tasks to complete before any photos are taken for listing on the MLS and on thousands of additional real estate websites. 

In addition to these tasks, we provide some helpful tips to ensure you are fully prepared for your selling journey. 

A Few Tips Before You Start

We’ll dive into the printable checklist in a bit, but first, here are some tips to aid you in the home-selling process.

Interview 2-3 Real Estate Agents

Realtors adopt thousands of different approaches and strategies to sell their clients homes faster and for more, but not all home selling strategies are legitimate. To help you weed agents out, we compiled a list of Realtor interview questions to ask sellers agents. As you shop, check out our home selling program and interview one of our top 1% sellers agents. They offer 1.7% commission, cancel anytime contracts, and increased marketing.

Prepare for the Home Energy Score

If you live in Portland, Milwaukie, or Hillsboro, a city mandate dictates that the homeowner purchase a home energy score before going on the real estate market. If the homeowner doesn’t order an energy score in advance, they can be fined $500 for each 180 days after an initial warning.

If you work with a real estate agent, they will help you coordinate and order that score. We do it all the time. Our preferred home energy score provider currently charges $155 for a score, and you can book and schedule it online.

If you prefer to tackle them yourself, here is a list of DIY efforts you can make here. Remember that some related home improvements can take time, so plan ahead. You can order an energy score anytime. It is good for up to eight years after ordering it (as long as you don’t make additional energy-related improvements).

Consider Doing a Home Inspection

You may want to pay for a pre-inspection of your home before selling, but we don’t typically recommend it. All home inspections done in the last 3 years before selling need to be provided to the new buyer, and the same buyer will likely request their own inspection. Since one formal inspection can be hundreds of pages long, you could have two hundred pages or more of inspection pages against the house. In my experience, each report brings different results, which means your list of issues grows.  

It can still be a good idea to prepare for potential issues, so we’ve made a list of the most common local home hazards here. Additionally, we recommend: 

• Visually checking the attic and crawlspace/basement for mold and pest intrusions. 
• Checking for any potential water issues in those spaces you typically wouldn’t visit daily. 

Since most home buyers in our area will order an inspection, you can avoid items typically on their list, but if you think you’re home may have one or more of these issues, it is a good idea to have a professional check it out before listing it on the real estate market.

• A whole house home inspection
• A radon test
• A sewer scope
• A test for underground oil tanks (for older homes) 
• Asbestos and lead tests in the home

Staging Your Home 

Staging your home for photos and showings greatly affects how quickly your home sells and for how much. You can hire a service or (if you have a good eye) you can do it yourself by renting furniture on consignment. 

The good news is that you can adopt staging techniques to suit any budget. For example, you don’t need to stage every room fully. You can limit your work to key furniture pieces in the main living areas, kitchen, primary bedroom, and bathrooms because they impact your listing photos most. There are also 3D staging programs that allow you to furnish the home as much as you like in a style that works well with your home and are popular with buyers, without the rental costs. 

Staging is a great way to accentuate the most appealing features of your home and show what’s possible in terms of room functions. But as you’ll find in the checklist below, it’s best not to keep too many personal items in the room. Just keep the look clean and clutter-free without personal photos.

Here are a few tricks to making the most of your home during staging:

• Rearrange furniture: You may have a current configuration you like, but rearranging can make the room look and feel larger and function better for average users.
  
• Use mirrors: They make rooms feel larger and reflect light to brighten the space.
  
• Create a clean, cozy environment. A folded throw blanket, a neutral-smelling candle, fragrance oils, and fresh-cut flowers can go a long way.

Understand the Buyer Mindset

Buyers typically form their first impression within 30 seconds of entering a home, and in that time, they aren’t just reviewing the layout or square footage. They’re looking to see if the home feels right. 

A clean home, a good-smelling space, natural light, and attractive views of the garden or surrounding land generate positive emotional responses right off the bat. In terms of room, most buyers focus on the kitchen, living room, dining space, primary bedroom, and bathrooms.

Storage is also a big deal, and buyers may open closets and cupboards, so try to make the spaces feel spacious and orderly to show a sense of calm and help the buyer feel like they are living there.

Printable Home Preparation Checklist

When Should You Sell?

The Portland metro area has annual buying and selling trends and seasonal highs and lows that determine your selling price. We provide a month-to-month breakdown on the best time to sell and back it with annual reports, but for a short answer, the best time to sell is March through May.

Consult a Top Real Estate Agent for Advice on Your Home

If you’re considering selling your home in the next 12 months, we’d love to schedule a tour and take a look. We can forecast the local real estate market and give advice on work that might be needed to get your home on the market, such as remodeling and prepping. We help homeowners choose home updates that generate the greatest return on investment.

We charge a reasonable 1.7% commission and provide effective, research-proven home marketing efforts. Check out our list of services and call our top 1% seller’s agents at 503-714-1111 or chat with the bot on our site. We look forward to connecting!