Planning to sell your home in retirement? Do these tasks first.

Dow Jones2025-12-30

MW Planning to sell your home in retirement? Do these tasks first.

By Richard Eisenberg

From pre-inspections to virtual staging, it's a whole new world for longtime homeowners

Retirees may want to use a real-estate agent, along with other professionals, to help sell a home these days.

My wife and I have been retired for a few years and expect that sometime fairly soon we'll sell our New Jersey house of 35 years and relocate to a condo in Los Angeles, where our sons and granddaughter live.

When we do, we'll join the 38% of retirees who've moved in retirement, according to the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies.

Now that we've begun the process, one thing is clear: Selling a home isn't like it was the last time we did it.

Jessica Lautz, vice president of research at the National Association of Realtors, offers this admonition to homeowners selling for the first time in years: "It's a very different housing market today."

Retirees need to learn a lot before undertaking the task. They are wise to begin long before listing their homes.

"The process can take at least a year of planning," said Julie Hall, who calls herself The Estate Lady and runs the American Society of Estate Liquidators.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, when many of today's retirees moved into the homes they're selling, attracting a buyer was simpler and low-tech. You listed your home with an agent who'd page through their Multiple Listing Service book and tell prospects about houses in their price range. A potential buyer would visit and, if they liked your home, hire an inspector for a structural assessment. With luck, you and the buyer would then negotiate a price. Voila!

Today, though, to attract millennial buyers searching for houses online, sellers often need to hire pre-listing inspectors, home stagers and possibly estate-sale or auction professionals; price their homes wisely; get alluring photos and videos of their residences; and launch time-consuming, exhausting, massive decluttering campaigns.

"Sellers are competing in a digital-first marketplace where buyers form opinions quickly and listing presentation matters," said Orphe Divounguy, senior economist at the Zillow real-estate brokerage and research firm.

In addition to understanding how to make their homes suitable for buyers, sellers need to be realistic about the state of the housing market.

Roughly half of real estate agents (48%) expect a buyer's market in 2026 while just 28% expect a seller's market and 24% foresee a balanced market, according to a survey by the Clever Offers real-estate listing platform. Sellers cut their prices on roughly 21% of listings in November, according to Zillow, and the National Association of Realtors says it now takes an average of 36 days for homes to sell.

High housing prices and mortgage rates could deter some home purchases in 2026.

Nearly two-third of buyers Clever Offers polled worry that rising home prices will delay their purchasing decisions. Already, a Bankrate analysis said, Americans earning the median income would be priced out of 75% of homes. Average prices have risen about 50% since 2020. Meanwhile, 84% of prospective buyers expect to pay the asking price or less, Clever Offers found.

Read: Over age 65? Watch out for these costly mistakes when selling your home.

Mortgage rates have fallen from 7% in January to 6.35%, but many forecasters foresee rates around 6% in 2026, which could still be too high for some hopeful buyers. It could also prevent older owners who have low-rate mortgages or are mortgage-free from listing their properties to avoid expensive loans when buying.

One advantage for many retired sellers: They've built up sizable home equity they can use from a sale to purchase a subsequent residence.

"Many longtime owners are selling with far more equity than previous generations had accumulated," Divounguy said. U.S. homeowner households have $35.8 trillion in home equity compared to just $5.3 trillion 30 years ago, he noted.

Here's how to sell your home if you haven't tried in a while, based on what experts say and my own experience:

Connect with a state-of-the-art real-estate agency

Preparing a home for sale is the top challenge sellers expect to face in 2026, according to the Clever Offers survey.

You'll want to find a real-estate agency intimately familiar with your market and that has a team of experts, or access to others, to sell your home smoothly and quickly.

A few months ago, my wife and I attended a highly-regarded agency's free workshop for prospective sellers that informed about a dozen of us about our current real-estate market and how to make our homes sellable.

Some homeowners prefer to sell their homes themselves and save the cost of a real-estate agent's fee (an amount that's become negotiable due to a 2024 lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors). But a good agent will bring sales, marketing and pricing expertise, which can be helpful if you haven't tried to sell a home in years.

Hire a pre-listing inspector

This pro will walk through your home with you, pointing out the structural problems that could concern a buyer when they bring in their own inspector. Typical fee: about $345.

By learning about these trouble spots in advance, you can either fix them or be prepared with a response if a buyer cites them. You may decide to offer a price concession rather than pay the cost of repairs.

Your real-estate agency may have a pre-listing inspector, as ours did, or can suggest a good one. Alternatively, you can review the directories of the American Society of Home Inspectors and the International Association of Certified Home Inspectors (InterNACHI).

Meet with a home stager to entice prospects

"Staging can be worth it because it helps reduce uncertainty for buyers," Divounguy said. Without staging a home, you might make some potential purchasers skittish because they can only see the place as it appears, questioning whether they'd want to live there.

A home stager will make suggestions for what you can do and then come to "pretty up" the place, sometimes bringing furniture, lamps and decorative pieces and storing away sofas, dressers, family photos and the like. Sellers pay about $1,800, on average, for home staging, according to HomeAdvisor.

In a National Association of Realtors survey, 83% of buyers' agents said staging made it easier for a buyer to visualize the property and 17% said it increased the amount of the offer by 1% to 5% compared to similar, unstaged homes.

Some real-estate agencies now use AI to provide virtual staging. With these tools, you can post in your home listing photos of what your home could look like. But be careful. "Issues tend to come up when the gap between the digital presentation and the in-person experience feels too wide," Divounguy said.

Virtual staging services can also let a prospective buyer select the home-decorating style they prefer and then see the house they're considering digitally transformed to match.

Zillow's, paid for by sellers' agents, is Zillow Showcase and the company says those listings sell for $7,000 more, on average, than similar non-Showcase listings. The HousingWire real-estate research firm calls REimagineHome the best overall AI virtual staging app of 2025 (cost: $14 a month and up).

Our real-estate agency recommended a stager who went room to room and gave us a depressingly long list of the furniture she thought buyers wouldn't want to see (the Wayfair pieces passed muster); bedroom walls she felt needed neutral colors; lighting and rugs she urged replacing and miscellaneous belongings she saw as clutter. We'll likely follow this stager's advice except for repainting.

Declutter as much as you can

That means either giving to charity items you won't take when you move, holding a yard sale or tag sale where locals will buy your inexpensive belongings, recycling what you can, taking some things to consignment shops and junking other stuff.

Decide which items you think you'll take with you when you move because you love them, they'll fit in your new, likely smaller, home and you can afford the cost of moving them.

Give yourself many months to do the decluttering. "You cannot whip this together at the last minute. It's just not going to happen," Hall said.

If you think local charities might come to your house and cart away furniture, call them a few weeks in advance to confirm they will, Hall said. Some will decline and others may charge you for the service.

Talk to estate-sales professionals or auctioneers

These pros know whether there's a market for your possessions and what people might pay for them. What's selling well these days? Gold and silver, Hall said.

Estate-sales companies aim to sell many pieces you have, sometimes agreeing to empty the place. They typically keep about 40% of what people pay. Customers make appointments to visit your home and decide about purchasing.

But if your home doesn't have enough items of value to meet an estate-sales company's minimum threshold, you won't be able to work with them. Many companies have minimums of $5,000 and $10,000, Hall said.

When my wife and I invited an estate saleswoman to walk through our house and told her which pieces we wanted to keep and which we didn't (mostly inherited ones), she declined holding a sale, saying we didn't have at least $3,000 worth of items for her.

"You should not be offended by that," Hall said. "Styles have changed, lifestyles have changed. The younger generation might want smaller pieces, like nightstands or a little coffee table they could paint Fire Engine Red."

The saleswoman said she thought a few small items, like our Herend China and Lalique crystal glassware, might sell if we took them to local antique shops. If the pieces sell, the antique store would likely keep 10% to 50% and we'd get the rest.