Selling your Sydney home: the exterior checklist that pays for itself
Before a sale, clean the exterior in this order: driveway and paths first (they anchor the street view and the photos), then the facade, then windows and gutters in the final week before photography. Book two to three weeks before the shoot. Buyers meet the outside of your home twice — in the listing photos and at the kerb — before they ever see a room.
Why the outside earns the money
Every buyer’s first two encounters with your home are exterior ones: the hero shot in the listing, and the walk from their car to your front door. Agents call it street appeal for a reason. A grey driveway, hazed windows and a mouldy south wall read as "this house has not been looked after" — and buyers price that feeling in, fairly or not.
Exterior cleaning is also the cheapest presentation work a seller can buy. Repainting a facade costs thousands and takes weeks. Washing it back to its actual colour costs a fraction of that and takes a morning. You are not adding anything to the house; you are removing the layer that hides what buyers are paying for.
The order matters: work top-down, photos last
Do the big surfaces first. The driveway and paths anchor every photo taken from the street, and they change the most — years of grime come off concrete in one visit, and the before-and-after is dramatic. The facade comes next: render, brick or weatherboard soft-washed back to colour, cobwebs and wasp nests gone from the eaves.
Save windows for the last week before photography and open homes. Glass gets dirty again fastest, especially near the harbour, and photographers shoot through it — clean windows are the difference between rooms that look bright and rooms that look filmy. Gutters matter too, even though buyers rarely look up: building inspectors do, and clear, recently maintained gutters are one less line on the inspection report for a buyer to negotiate with.
The timeline that works
Three weeks out: driveway, paths, facade, roof if it is visibly mossy, and gutters. Two weeks out: fix anything the clean revealed — cleaning exposes flaking paint and cracked render that grime was hiding, and it is far better to discover that before the photographer does. One week out: windows inside and out, and a final rinse of glass, front door and entry area.
One warning from the insurance angle: if your gutters have been neglected, deal with them before the contract period, not after. Water damage is among the most common Australian home-insurance claims — QBE puts it at 24% of all home claims — and a photographed record of recent gutter maintenance is a useful thing to have when a buyer’s inspector starts asking questions about the ceiling.
One visit or a campaign?
For most homes the whole list is one or two visits: driveway, facade, gutters and roof in the first, windows in the second, timed to the photographer. Tell us your photo date and we work backwards from it.
If you are not selling for six months, do it in reverse: get the exterior onto a schedule now, and by the time the campaign starts the house simply is well kept, rather than dressed up to look it. Buyers and inspectors can tell the difference — that is rather the point.