Getting your house ready for sale: what's worth doing

Ask three estate agents what to do before you sell and you’ll get three lists. Ask for the evidence behind them and the lists get much shorter. There’s very little Irish data on which jobs pay for themselves in the sale price. Most advice is experience and opinion, some of it good. Here’s what we can say with some confidence, and where the evidence runs out.

Fix what a surveyor will find

The jobs most worth doing aren’t the ones that add value. They’re the ones that stop a buyer knocking money off. Nearly every buyer with a mortgage gets a survey done, and anything that turns up there becomes a reason to renegotiate after you’ve agreed a price, at the point where you have the least leverage.

So deal with the obvious things before you list: a boiler on its last legs, signs of damp, a leaking gutter, cracked tiles, windows that won’t close. If you know about a bigger problem you can’t fix, it’s usually better priced in from the start than discovered later.

Cosmetic work beats refits

Agents interviewed by the Irish Times in 2023 were remarkably consistent:

• paint over strong colours with something neutral;
• respray kitchen units rather than replace them. One called it “transformational” for the money;
• regrout bathrooms and clean every appliance;
• tidy the front garden, because it’s in the first photo and it’s where the first viewing starts;
• power-wash the patio, and take out some furniture so rooms look bigger.

What none of them recommended was a new kitchen or bathroom to sell. The figures you’ll see online claiming a 70% or 100% “return” on renovations come from contractors and marketing sites with no method behind them. A full refit rarely earns back its cost, and buyers often plan to put in their own anyway.

A home-staging professional quoted in the same article suggested spending between 0.5% and 1.5% of the asking price on getting a house ready. On a €500,000 house, that’s €2,500 to €7,500. It’s a sensible ceiling for most homes.

Declutter, clean, and get the photographs right

International research, mainly from the US, consistently puts decluttering and cleaning at the top of agents’ lists. In the 2025 survey by America’s National Association of Realtors, 91% of agents recommended decluttering before listing and 88% a thorough clean. About half said a staged home sold faster.

In Dublin, professional photography, a floor plan and often a video are now standard. Expect to pay around €500 plus VAT if they aren’t included in the agent’s fee. Ask to see the photos before the listing goes live and push back on a poor lead image. It’s the one most buyers judge you on.

Full home staging, with rented furniture and styling, costs from about €3,000 to well over €10,000 in Dublin. Anecdotes from staging firms suggest it can lift the price of a hard-to-sell or empty property, but there’s no Irish study measuring the effect. It’s most likely to pay off on a vacant apartment or a home where the furniture is working against it.

The BER: what it’s really worth

A better energy rating does show up in the price, but by less than some headlines suggest.

The most careful Irish figure comes from Central Bank research published in July 2026. Across listings from 2015 to 2024, each step up the BER scale added about 1.6% to the asking price on average. The premium has been shrinking, from 1.9% in 2015 to 1.3% in 2024, about €5,000 per step on an average home. Bigger raw gaps you might see quoted, such as A and B-rated homes being worth €97,000 more, mostly reflect the fact that those homes are newer and bigger, not the rating itself.

Our own figures show the effect on how fast homes sell. Dublin homes with a B or C rating went from listing to closing in a median of 145 to 147 days. Homes rated F or G took 166 to 169 days, and sold for less over their asking price.

A few things to bear in mind:

• The scale changed on 24 May 2026. New certificates use eight bands, A0 to G, instead of fifteen, so “one grade” now covers a bigger range. Older studies don’t translate directly.
• Cheap measures can make sense. Attic insulation is the classic one. SEAI grants for it are currently €1,500 for a semi-detached or end-of-terrace house and €2,000 for a detached house. You must get grant approval before you buy materials or start work, so allow time.
• Deep retrofits usually don’t pay back on a sale. A heat pump or external insulation costing tens of thousands won’t come back in the price within a selling timeframe. Many buyers plan to do the work themselves anyway: in a Bank of Ireland survey, 88% of first-time buyers buying a second-hand home said they planned energy upgrades.

Your BER certificate also comes with an advisory report listing the improvements that would raise the rating. It’s worth reading before you decide.

When to list: what Dublin’s sales say

Received wisdom says spring is the time to sell. Our data says otherwise, at least for Dublin since mid-2023. We looked at homes by the month they first went on the market:

Month listed	Median days to closing	Median sold vs asking
January	149	+9.2%
February	149	+8.8%
March	161	+8.0%
April	167	+7.2%
May	169	+6.9%
June	161	+7.6%
September	158	+7.0%
October	165	+7.6%

Homes listed in January and February sold fastest and with the biggest premium. April and May, when the most new homes come on the market, were the slowest and least competitive. That fits what some agents have said for years: buyers looking in the new year are motivated, and there’s less competition from other sellers. September is the busiest month for new listings, so autumn sellers face the most competition of all.

These are averages across tens of thousands of sales, and a well-priced house sells in any month. But if you have a choice, early in the year looks better than late spring.

Sort the paperwork before the first viewing

This is the part sellers most often leave too late, and it causes more collapsed sales than anything about the house itself. The Law Society and the Society of Chartered Surveyors have named seven common causes of delay, nearly all of them paperwork:

• Title deeds. If you have a mortgage, the lender has them. Ask your solicitor to request them now.
• Planning and building regulations. Any extension, attic conversion or significant change needs an architect’s or engineer’s opinion that it complied or was exempt. If something wasn’t done properly, sorting it out through a Section 5 declaration or retention permission takes months. Having lasted seven years without enforcement doesn’t make work authorised, and buyers’ lenders will still want the paperwork.
• Property taxes. LPT must be up to date, and the old household charge cleared.
• Roads and services. Whether the council has taken charge of your estate’s roads and services.
• Probate. If you’re selling an inherited home, start the grant of probate before you list.
• Mortgage redemption figures from your lender, and management company documents if it’s an apartment or managed estate.

Our conveyancing guide explains each of these.

A pre-sale survey costs about €400 to €600 plus VAT for a standard survey. It isn’t usual in Ireland, and there’s no evidence it gets you a better price, but it can be worth it on an older house so you aren’t surprised by the buyer’s survey.

Be straight about known problems

Irish property law works on “buyer beware”. You don’t have a general duty to volunteer every defect. But anything you or your agent says has to be true. The buyer’s solicitor will also send detailed questions, and every answer given on your behalf has to be accurate and complete. Hiding a problem or answering falsely is misrepresentation, which can unwind a sale or lead to a claim long after you’ve moved out.

Pyrite. If you’re selling a home built between 1997 and 2013 in an estate known to have pyrite problems, buyers and their solicitors may well ask about it, so have any test results ready. If your home is affected, check now: new applications to the Pyrite Remediation Scheme close on 30 November 2026.