Why it matters
Buyers decide how well a house has been looked after within a minute or two of walking in, and they decide it from small things. A greasy range hood, soap scum on the shower glass or dust along the baseboards makes people wonder what else was left. A buyer who starts wondering about maintenance starts looking for problems, and that shows up in the offer.
Photos make it sharper. Most buyers see the listing on a phone before they ever book a showing. Listing photos are taken with wide lenses and bright light, which is exactly what shows fingerprints on stainless steel, streaks on windows and a dull film on floors.
Here is a typical case. A couple in Abbotsford is listing a three-bedroom house they have lived in for twelve years. They tidy up themselves the weekend before photos. The house looks neat. In the photos, the kitchen window is hazy against the light, the glass shower door looks cloudy, and the grout by the tub is grey. Their agent asks for a reshoot of three rooms, which pushes the listing back a week.
The places that matter most before a sale are not the ones you clean every week:
- Kitchen: range hood, backsplash, cupboard fronts near the stove, inside the oven and fridge. Buyers open them.
- Bathrooms: grout, shower glass, around the base of the toilet, the fan cover.
- Windows and tracks, inside. Clean glass makes rooms look brighter in photos.
- Baseboards, door frames, light switches and the front door itself.
- Smell. Pets, cooking and damp are things you stop noticing in your own home. Buyers notice at the door.
Order matters. Declutter and pack first, then repairs and paint, then the deep clean, then photos. Cleaning before the painter comes means paying to clean twice.
If you are short on time or budget, do the kitchen and the main bathroom properly before anything else. Those two rooms carry most of a buyer's impression, and they get the closest look in photos and at showings.
How Honourable Cleaning helps
A pre-listing clean is our deep clean with the attention pointed at what buyers and cameras pick up. A deep clean of a three-bedroom, two-bathroom home is $335 plus GST and takes a crew of two around four and three-quarter hours. You see the exact price for your home online before you book. When you book, tap kitchen, bathrooms, windows and baseboards as priorities and tell us the photo date in the notes.
If the house will be on the market for a few weeks while you are still living in it, a lighter standard clean before open houses keeps it at that level. A standard clean of the same home is $190 plus GST.
Once you have moved out, a move-out clean of the empty house gets it ready for the buyers' walkthrough. If anything is missed on any visit, tell us within 24 hours and we re-clean it free.
Key takeaways
- Do things in order: declutter, repair and paint, deep clean, then photos.
- Put the effort into the kitchen, bathrooms, interior windows and baseboards, since buyers and cameras catch those first.
- Book the clean one or two days before the photographer, not the same morning.
- Plan a quick standard clean before each open house if you are living in the home while it sells.
See your exact price
Pick your home size and service. Your flat rate shows up in about a minute, no phone call needed.
See my price →Call (604) 751-6260Questions people ask
Should I have my house professionally cleaned before selling?
Yes. A deep clean before the listing photos is one of the lowest-cost things you can do to a home you are selling, and it is one of the few that every buyer notices. Book it after you have decluttered and finished any repairs or painting, and a day or two before the photographer comes.
Related pages
House cleaning in Abbotsford Move-out cleaning in Abbotsford