How to prepare your home for sale

Preparing your home for sale means removing what gets in the way, fixing the small things a buyer notices and showing it in good light with professional photos before it goes online, not after. Most of it takes a week and little money. What you should not do is go to market half ready: interest peaks in the first days, and a home that launches badly usually ends up with a price cut.

What to do, what to skip, and a room-by-room checklist at the end. If you are still unsure about the figure, read how much is my home worth first.

Why do the first two weeks matter so much?

Because that is when the most people look at your home. Portals show new listings first, buyers with saved alerts get the email that day, and agents match it against their open requirements. According to Idealista, 16 % of the homes sold in the first quarter of 2025 had been listed for less than a week. In 2024 the average time to close a sale was 73 days in Spain and 66 in Málaga province (Tecnocasa and Pompeu Fabra University report).

If you launch with phone photos and a cluttered terrace, that first wave of buyers rules you out without viewing. When you reshoot two weeks later, the listing is no longer new: portals rank it lower, the alerts have gone out, and the buyer who saw it twice concludes it is not selling. That is where reductions begin.

What do I remove and what do I keep?

The buyer has to be able to picture their own life in the house, and that does not happen in a home full of yours. Keep what gives scale, remove what distracts.

Remove: family photos, fridge magnets, collections, clothes on view, half of every wardrobe (a full wardrobe looks small), the small appliances on the worktop, the bottles in the bathroom, loose cables, tired rugs and surplus furniture. If a room does three jobs (ironing, desk and guest bed), choose one and make it obvious.

Keep: the sofa, the bed made up in white linen, a table with its chairs, a couple of living plants, two or three objects per room. An empty home looks small and cold; an overfilled home looks smaller still. If it does not fit, two months of a rented storage unit cost less than any reduction.

Which repairs pay off and which do not?

Fix what the buyer sees and doubts; do not pay for what the buyer will change to their own taste.

What about the terrace on the Costa del Sol?

Here the terrace is the room buyers look at most, and often the one that decides. A buyer from the UK or Scandinavia is buying breakfast outside in January; show them exactly that.

• Clear everything that is not terrace: drying rack, gas bottles, bicycles, boxes, dead plants.
• Furniture in proportion: a table with two or four chairs and a sun lounger if there is room. A few pieces well placed, not eight stacked chairs.
• Living plants: three large pots do more than fifteen small ones.
• Shade in working order: awning clean and running, pergola without broken cane; if there is none, a sail or a parasol.
• Floor, railings and glass clean; if there is a view, nothing in front of it.

In villas and townhouses: lawn cut, hedges trimmed, irrigation working, pool clean and full.

What time of day for the photos, and why not a phone?

The hour depends on the orientation: east-facing terrace, morning; west-facing, mid afternoon; south-facing, mid morning before the light turns harsh. Here the problem is rarely too little sun but too much: a sea-facing window at midday burns out on any camera that cannot blend exposures. The photographer picks the hour and, if the home has a sunset, comes back for it. On the day: blinds up, every light on, beds made, worktops clear, toilet lids down, no washing on the line and no car in the driveway.

A phone is not enough because a buyer decides in seconds whether to open your listing, and a phone distorts rooms with its wide angle, burns out the windows and tilts the verticals. A professional shoot uses a tripod at the right height, blends exposures so you see the living room and the view at once, straightens the lines, sequences the photos so they tell the home and delivers the resolution portals and print need. No tricks: the home has to match the photos when the buyer walks in. At Grupo dhoce the shoot is part of the sales strategy, and it happens once the home is ready.

Video and floor plan?

Yes to both, and the agency produces them. The short walk-through video works for social media and helps the buyer who lives abroad understand how the rooms connect. The measured floor plan is something almost every international buyer asks for: it tells them whether their furniture fits and avoids pointless viewings. Our architecture team draws it.

Light staging or full home staging?

Light staging you do yourself with this guide: clear, tidy, new textiles (cushions, towels, white bed linen), plants, a couple of lamps and the terrace set up. A week and a few hundred euros.

Full staging is done by a professional with rental furniture. It is worth it when the home is empty, when it is an inheritance furnished in another era, or when it competes with many similar homes in the same development.

The industry figures come from the Spanish Home Staging Association (AHSE), as quoted by Xataka Home in 2024: 96.6 % of staged homes sold within three months and 43 % within a month; the full service costs between 0.5 % and 1.5 % of the home's value. These are the association's own figures, not an independent study. For a 400,000 euro home that means between 2,000 and 6,000 euros; a single 3 % reduction is 12,000 euros.

How do I handle a viewing?

• A comfortable temperature: heating on half an hour before in winter, air conditioning in summer.
• Light: blinds up and lights on, even in daytime.
• Air the house fifteen minutes before and skip strong air fresheners: buyers assume they hide something.
• Pets out, and their beds and bowls put away.
• The owner is not there. With the owner present a buyer does not open wardrobes, criticise or ask, and it is in those criticisms that the agent turns an objection into an offer. If you cannot avoid it, say hello and leave.
• Keep the community and IBI receipts and the energy certificate to hand: documents for selling.

What does an architect see in your home that the buyer sees too?

Three things, and in all three it pays to get ahead.

Damp. Stains on the ceiling below a terrace or a bathroom, tide marks on an outside wall, bubbling paint at skirting level, a smell in a wardrobe. Painting over it without fixing the cause shows again within two weeks and any surveyor spots it. What to do: find the source (terrace joint, downpipe, rising damp, condensation), repair it, let it dry and then paint. Keep the invoice.

Enclosures and unlicensed works. The glazed-in terrace, the covered porch, the removed partition wall, two flats joined into one. A buyer with a lawyer asks for the licence and the community's approval; so does the bank financing the purchase. In an apartment building, enclosing a terrace requires the vote of three fifths of the owners and of the shares (Ley de Propiedad Horizontal, the Horizontal Property Act, article 10.3.b). What to do: check whether the work appears in the title deed and the Catastro, ask the town hall how to regularise it (in many municipalities a responsible declaration with technical documents is enough, but it varies), and if it cannot be regularised, say so before the viewing and reflect it in the price.

Old installations. A fuse board without an RCD, fabric-covered wiring, lead pipes, aluminium windows without a thermal break, air conditioning from twenty years ago. You do not renovate to sell, but you do explain. Our architecture team can accompany the sale with a renovation sketch and an indicative cost, and that changes the conversation: "it is dated" becomes "I know what it costs to make it mine". That is the advantage of selling through an agency that also designs and renovates.

Room-by-room checklist