Many sellers of an older home put their cash into paint and posies, only to have the sale teeter in the third month because the buyer’s inspector flagged the switchboard. The sales that sail at top dollar are those where somebody stepped in first and did the unsung thing: Inspect, repair the truly hazardous stuff, and only then pretty up the photo. The correct order is more important than the funds.
Start with your own building and pest inspection
Many homeowners assume that it’s the buyer’s job to uncover any potential problems in the house. This approach can lead to unpleasant surprises and substantial repair costs being deducted from the final sale price during negotiations. But getting a building and pest inspection before putting your home on the market can be a game-changer. You’ll instantly have the upper hand in negotiations as you’ll know exactly what needs fixing and what doesn’t. This means the buyer’s inspection will likely reveal no new issues outstanding that can be used to drive down the price since your initial inspection would have already uncovered them.
Electrical faults are the ones nobody sees coming
Relying solely on a general building inspection means you’re almost certainly exposing the sale to unnecessary risk. Most building inspections won’t pick up a range of common electrical issues. Existing wiring that doesn’t meet current safety standards, for a start. You’ll have no choice but to update it if you expand your home or renovate. But what if you’re staying put? It’s tempting to shrug it off, right up until the crumbling insulation literally bursts into flames. New switchboards shouldn’t be ignored, either: in an average year, the ESFI says there are 5,202 fires caused by switchboard failure or malfunction. Newer isn’t always better.
Even perfect wiring can run into trouble, simply because nothing lasts forever. Wires installed in the middle decades of the 20th century are notorious for their heat-producing capabilities. They also degraded alarmingly fast. Replacing them should be on your to-do list if your home is already affected. If you live in a home built between 1940 and 1970 and the wiring hasn’t been touched, there’s a real chance an electrical fault is currently responsible for causing a fire within your wall.
The good news is that this is relatively cheap to check and often cheap to fix. Before you get into any debate about expenses, it’s worth looking into a free electrical safety inspection and find out for sure. And while the total price may be around $1200 plus GST to supply and fit a new switchboard, the mere fact of having this problem on the table in a negotiation can otherwise cost you that and more on your house sale.
After the AS/NZS 3000:2018 update to the Australian Wiring Rules, RCD protection on all lighting and power circuits has become obligatory for new work. Older homes were built under past editions and may well have partial protection at best – maybe the power circuits are covered but the lights aren’t, or there’s one safety switch doing the job of three. Your local sparky will be able to tell you exactly where your home sits against the current standard and what it would take to bring it up to a reasonable level.
This isn’t about retrofitting a 1960s house to meet every clause of a modern code. It’s about closing the gap that actually matters for safety and for buyer confidence. A new switchboard with proper safety switches is a few hours of work for a licensed tradesperson, and it’s absolutely the kind of upgrade a conveyancer or buyer’s agent will specifically ask about. Get it sorted early, and it stops being a question mark on your file.
Smoke alarms: cheap to fix, expensive to ignore
Ensuring all smoke alarms are in compliance might seem like a trivial matter compared to other issues but, if they’re not, you can almost guarantee that you’ll get bitten over them at the pointy end. The actual requirements can differ according to region – all being hardwired photoelectric in some, interconnection between different levels in others, and photoelectric or ionisation being excluded in others. New smoke alarms have a ten-year lifespan (or as little as five years when fitted to pre-1980s homes); requirements have shifted substantially over time.
The outlay is trivial; parts and labour might tally a few hundred dollars in the worst case. However, it’s the type of thing that the purchasers’ reps will ensure compliance on exchange. Better to get the unpleasant surprises out of the way before you market your home.
Plumbing problems hide until someone looks
There are some issues that will come out once they do the home inspection. These are ideal issues to have, because they are surmountable and they already want to buy your house. A lot of buyers will try to get the seller to cover repairs after inspection, or failing that will want a better price. Leaky old plumbing is a fantastic candidate here. New plumbing will set you back some, but it’s exactly the sort of expense people will take out of the price of the house, give or take a bit of haggling.
Handle asbestos and lead paint through testing, not DIY
If the property was built before 1990, there’s a reasonable chance asbestos is present somewhere – old siding, insulation, vinyl flooring, wet area sheeting. The important thing to understand is that sound, undisturbed asbestos isn’t an emergency. It can often legally remain in place as long as it’s disclosed properly to the buyer. The risk starts when someone decides to sand it, drill it, or rip it out without a license, which is exactly what happens during enthusiastic pre-sale renovations.
Get a licensed assessor to test and report on it. That report either clears the property or gives you a clear, bounded cost to deal with it professionally. Either outcome is better than guessing, and either outcome protects you from the liability that comes with disturbing material you didn’t know was there.
Lead paint follows a similar logic for homes built before 1970. The danger isn’t the paint sitting quietly on a windowsill – it’s the dust created when someone scrapes or sands it to repaint a room before an open home. Encapsulation (painting over it properly) combined with honest disclosure is almost always the safer and cheaper route compared to full removal.
Spend your renovation budget on durability, not decoration
There is a common misconception in real estate marketing that a new kitchen or bathroom is the key to selling an older property. If your aim is to get it in and out of your hands ASAP, the statistics hardly ever match. Over the years, renovation return-on-investment surveys have demonstrated that aesthetic, low-cost improvements such as a fresh coat of paint, new carpeting, updated switch plates and fittings, perform better than major renovations when the purpose is to resell quickly, rather than enjoy the improvements for many years.
For gutter and downpipe repairs, apply the same logic. They’re not glamorous, potential buyers barely notice them during an inspection, but they still matter a lot once a building appraiser has taken a good look at your home. A new kitchen might set you back tens of thousands of dollars and you only get a fraction of that money back when you sell your property. Repairing gutters, downpipes, and some internal damage will cost you much less, but it’s highly likely to remove objections rather than simply adding some sparkle.
Curb appeal is still important. Neat gardens, a fixed fence, a clean driveway might give your property a lift when a prospective buyer pulls up to the curb, and they’re worth sorting out. However, they should be the finishing touch of your preparation, not your go-to points of action. No amount of landscaping can compensate for a negative building and pest inspection or an electrical audit once the buyer has appointed his expert.
Build the paper trail that proves the house has been looked after
Every check and every modification pays off twice when you have the paperwork. Store those dated receipts and invoices for the safety switch update, smoke alarm fitting, any plumbing job, roof maintenance, the asbestos review – everything. This is your seller file.
That folder does two things. Firstly, it gives the seller the right amount of information. Documents such as a Section 32 statement must legally report any known deficiencies, and a completely checked and restored background makes this simple rather than creating grievances after the sale. Second, it alters the way a house is viewed by buyers. A hefty folder of check-up notes redefines an older house from “probably needs work” to “clearly maintained,” and at the time of settlement, that change is worth a significant amount of money.
Sequence beats speed
The sequence in which you do tasks is as important as each individual job. For example, the inspection should be the first priority. This is because it’s the most cost-effective way to identify issues. Then you should focus on repairs based on the inspection reports rather than guessing or making decisions based on what looks bad in photos. Renovations like beautification should be done last. This is because no level of styling can hide a problem that will be discovered by the inspector of a potential buyer of the property.
Begin with checking electrical safety because it’s easy to assess, important to rectify, and hard to notice for people who lack the necessary tools to conduct electrical inspections. Assess plumbing and pest issues based on their reports, and only then start preparing and painting the property and working on the garden. This order will help you protect the price you hope to get when selling the property.
