How to present a house for an open home

Most of what actually moves a buyer through a house at an open home has nothing to do with the property itself and everything to do with the twenty minutes before the first visitor walks in. Agents see this every single weekend — two houses on the same street, similar size, similar price, and one gets three offers while the other sits. The difference is rarely the house. It’s almost always the presentation.

Declutter harder than feels reasonable

Every agent has the same story: the vendor who thinks their house is already tidy, and it is — tidy for living in. Selling is a different standard. Buyers aren’t just looking at a room, they’re trying to picture their own life in it, and every personal object in the way makes that harder. Family photos, kids’ drawings on the fridge, the pile of mail on the bench, the collection on the mantelpiece — all of it needs to go into boxes before the first open home, not tidied into a neater pile.

Kitchen benches and bathroom vanities should be essentially bare. It feels extreme while you’re doing it and looks obviously better the moment you stand back and look at the room with fresh eyes.

Fix the small stuff, even though it feels pointless

A dripping tap, a cracked tile, a flyscreen hanging off its track — none of these are expensive to fix, and none of them will stop a determined buyer from making an offer. But they cost you something else: a buyer who notices one small unfixed thing starts wondering what else hasn’t been looked after, and that doubt follows them through the rest of the house. Agents see this constantly — a $40 repair avoided turns into a buyer mentally discounting the price by a lot more than $40.

Let the light in, and turn every light on

Open every curtain and blind, even on a grey day. Turn on every light in the house, including ones you’d never normally have on during daylight hours. It sounds excessive and it isn’t — a bright room reads as bigger, cleaner, and more cared-for than the same room in flat afternoon light, and buyers form an impression in the first ten seconds of walking through the door.

Deal with smell before you deal with anything else

Cooking smells, pet smells, damp, cigarette smoke — buyers notice smell before they notice anything else about a room, and it’s the one thing you can’t photograph away or explain around. Air the house out well before people arrive, don’t cook anything strong-smelling that morning, and if you’ve got pets, get them and their bedding out of the house, not just out of sight.

Space, not emptiness

There’s a difference between decluttered and stripped bare. A completely empty room is oddly harder to picture furnished than a well-arranged one — buyers need some reference for scale. The goal is removing the excess: the extra armchair nobody sits in, the exercise bike in the corner of the bedroom, anything that’s there because it needs a home rather than because the room needs it. What’s left should make the room feel bigger and show how someone would actually move through it.

Don’t forget the garage and the shed

Buyers open cupboards, and they open garage doors. A garage stacked to the roof with boxes tells a buyer the house doesn’t have enough storage — even if the real problem is just that nobody’s sorted through it in years. The same goes for sheds, linen cupboards, and the space under the stairs. You don’t need these spaces to be empty, but they should look like they could hold more than they currently do. If you’re mid-pack for a move anyway, this is a good excuse to do the sorting early rather than leaving it for moving day.

Don’t over-stage it either

There’s a version of “presented well” that tips into looking like nobody actually lives there — a project-home display suite rather than a home. A bowl of fruit and a throw rug is a nice touch; hired-in furniture in every room and zero sign of personality can leave buyers feeling like the house is trying too hard to hide something. The goal is a house that looks cared for and easy to picture yourself in, not one that looks staged for a magazine shoot. If you’re using a professional stylist, a light touch in the main living areas usually beats a full furniture swap throughout.

Don’t forget the street

The first impression happens before anyone reaches your front door. Mow the lawn, pull the obvious weeds, sweep the path, and get the bins out of sight. A scruffy front yard makes buyers lower their expectations before they’ve even walked in — and a house that then looks better inside than the outside promised is a much better outcome than the reverse.

Be somewhere else during the open home

This one’s hard for a lot of vendors, but it matters: buyers don’t talk honestly about a house with the owner standing in the room. They won’t point out what they don’t like, won’t linger to really look at a space, and won’t ask the questions they actually want answered. Leave it to the agent and go for a coffee. You’ll get more honest feedback secondhand than you would standing in your own hallway.

Put valuables and medication away, not just for presentation

An open home means strangers walking freely through your house, sometimes in numbers you can’t fully track. Jewellery, cash, prescription medication, and anything else genuinely valuable or sensitive should be locked away or removed entirely before every single open home, not just the first one. This isn’t about distrust of buyers specifically — it’s a sensible habit regardless of who’s coming through.

The renovation trap

A lot of vendors, in the run-up to selling, want to do “one more thing” — a full kitchen reno, new bathroom tiling, a deck rebuild. Agents will often tell you, if you ask directly, that most of these big-ticket renovations done purely to sell don’t return their cost in the sale price. A fresh coat of neutral paint, decent cleaning, and fixing what’s actually broken usually does more for your result than a five-figure renovation squeezed in before the first open home. If you’re genuinely unsure whether a bigger job is worth it, ask your agent directly what similar recent sales in the area suggest — don’t assume bigger spend means bigger return.

A short checklist before your first open home

None of this is complicated, and none of it costs much. It’s also the single highest-leverage thing a vendor controls in the entire selling process — more than the marketing, more than the timing, more than almost anything short of the price itself.

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