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5 Tips to Sell Your Home for Top Dollar
How to fetch the best price in today’s market
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Key takeaways
- It’s a good time to sell: The median existing-home price reached $429,100 in August, marking 38 straight months of annual price gains.
- Decluttering and depersonalizing can help buyers focus on your home’s space and features.
- Strategic upgrades, landscaping improvements and professional staging may help boost your home’s sale price.
Today’s rising home prices, coupled with an acute shortage of affordable homes, is bad news for home buyers but good news for sellers.
The median existing home sales price reached $429,100 in August, according to the National Association of Realtors’ monthly report. That’s up 1.6 percent from a year ago — and the 38th consecutive month of year-over-year price increases.
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For many homeowners, especially older adults who’ve owned their home for decades and have built a significant sum of equity, it’s hard not to think about capitalizing on this hot market and downsizing to a smaller abode.
So what can you do to sell your home for top dollar? Here are five steps to consider taking.
1. Figure out what it’s worth
A real estate agent can recommend a listing price, but it doesn’t hurt to look around yourself so that you have a sense of what your home is worth before meeting with an agent.
Consider looking at what similar homes in your area recently sold for. Redfin, Realtor.com and Zillow allow you to quickly search for this information, and you can narrow the results using filters such as the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, square footage and lot size.
2. Declutter
A professionally cleaned home can make your property more appealing during showings and open houses. But before listing your home, go an extra step by “editing” each room. This entails removing excess furniture and anything that could make the space feel crowded or distract from the home’s features, says Shell Brodnax, president of the Real Estate Staging Association.
If you’re planning to downsize for retirement, use this as an opportunity to decide what belongings you’ll keep, donate or sell. “The goal is not to make the home feel empty,” Brodnax says. “It’s to help buyers clearly see the available space, understand how each room can function and imagine themselves living there.”
Start with the easy decisions: If you’re going from a house on an acre of land to a condo, selling your lawn mower and gardening tools is a no-brainer. Then tackle the harder stuff, like determining what to do with your grandfather’s stuffed moose head, your kids’ trophies and that lamp your spouse loves but you loathe.
You might consider hiring an estate agent to help you sell the valuables that you don’t want to keep. “People think of an estate sale only when somebody dies,” says Bob Lang, president of Blue Moon Estate Sales in Raleigh, North Carolina. “That’s a very common mistake. Estate sales are a good way to help people downsize.”
3. Depersonalize
Depersonalizing doesn’t mean stripping your home of all its warmth and character — it means reducing highly personal, and potentially distracting, elements so that buyers can focus on the home itself. Read: Pack away political or religious items, family photo displays, sports memorabilia, personal collections and decor with a very specific point of view.
“The goal is to create a welcoming, polished environment where buyers can easily imagine making the home their own,” Brodnax says.
4. Make strategic home improvements
If it’s been years since you updated your home, shining up the place may help you fetch a higher price. And according to Zonda Home’s “2025 Cost vs. Value” report, you don’t have to shell out a ton of money on a big remodeling project to increase your home’s value.
A new garage door is at the top of Zonda Home’s list of home improvements with the best return on investment. Perhaps that’s no surprise, though, considering how frequently real estate agents talk about the importance of curb appeal — how a house looks when buyers first pull up. (A tattered garage door says, “Just guess how many other things need to be fixed!”)
One affordable way to improve your home’s curb appeal is to spruce up the landscaping. Studies show well-executed landscaping can boost a property’s value by as much as 15 percent.
5. Consider staging
Those homes that sell for fabulous sums on HGTV? Many are professionally staged — that is, someone takes your stuff out and brings in some artfully arranged furniture, as well as a fern or two. According to recent data from the Real Estate Staging Association, staged listings in 2025 sold for roughly 7 to 13 percent above asking price.
“In a hot market, staging will help sell your home faster and many times for over the list price,” Brodnax says.
But make sure to factor in staging expenses. Most staging projects cost between $1,000 and $6,000 for the first 60 days, according to RESA.
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