Insights

Should I renovate before selling my parent’s house?

david.zadareky@compass.com (David Zadareky) — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 13:08:58 GMT

Not necessarily. Before you hire a contractor, compare what the home could sell for today with what you’d realistically keep after improvements, carrying costs, and the time required to complete them.

If you’re helping a parent move or preparing a home after a loss, this decision comes with more than a renovation budget. You may be sorting decades of belongings, coordinating with siblings, and trying to manage everything around your own life.

The goal isn’t to make the house perfect. It’s to choose a sale plan that makes sense for your family.

Start with three options

1. Sell in its current condition

This deserves serious consideration when the family needs a simpler process, the home needs substantial work, or there’s limited time and cash available for improvements.

You still need a deliberate plan for presentation and pricing. A dated but clean, accessible home is different from one buyers can’t properly see because rooms are packed with belongings.

The tradeoff: you avoid managing a renovation, but the price needs to reflect the work a buyer will take on.

2. Make targeted improvements

This is the first improvement strategy I’d evaluate. Focus on the specific things that make it harder for a buyer to understand, trust, or enjoy the home.

Depending on the property, that might mean clearing rooms, deep cleaning, painting selected spaces, improving lighting, or addressing a documented repair. Each project needs a reason tied to the sale.

A Home Audit is how I sort which items are worth doing before a sale and which a buyer will simply price in.

The tradeoff: a focused scope can improve presentation, but even smaller projects need written estimates, scheduling, and someone to oversee them.

3. Undertake a larger renovation

A larger renovation belongs on the table only when the likely result supports the cost and your family can manage the time, cash, and uncertainty involved.

A new kitchen may look wonderful. That doesn’t establish what buyers will pay for it in this particular house, on this particular street.

The 2025 Remodeling Impact Report from NAR and NARI distinguishes homeowner satisfaction from estimated cost recovery. Those national estimates are useful context, but they don’t replace a local comparison of your home’s options.

Compare what you keep, not just the sale price

Here’s an illustrative example, not an estimate for your home:

Sell now: estimated sale price of $800,000.
Improve first: estimated sale price of $850,000, minus $35,000 in work and $8,000 in additional carrying costs.

That leaves a $7,000 difference before accounting for changes in selling costs, financing costs, or unexpected work. Your family would then decide whether that potential gain justifies the additional time and responsibility.

What should we look at before deciding?

Buyer alternatives: What comparable homes can buyers choose from, and how does their condition compare?
Evidence from recent sales: What did similar updated and unupdated homes actually sell for?
The work itself: What are the written scope, estimates, schedule, and contingency?
Your family’s priorities: Is the main goal more money, less responsibility, a shorter timeline, or a balance of all three?

I’d build a side-by-side comparison of the realistic choices before recommending a project. Broad rules such as “always update the kitchen” skip the most important part: whether the work makes sense for this home and this family.

Make the plan before putting the home on the market

My recommendation is to settle the condition and pricing strategy before launch. Buyers should see a home that’s ready for the audience we intend to reach, with a price that reflects its condition.

If you’re still sorting out the next step, start with help with selling a parent’s home. If you’re handling a property after a death, visit estate sales.

Let’s compare your options

You don’t need to decide on renovations before we talk. We can start with the house as it stands, your family’s priorities, and the choices worth considering.

Start a conversation

More Homes for Sale. Fewer Buyers. What Does That Actually Mean for Northern Virginia Homeowners?

david.zadareky@compass.com (David Zadareky) — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 13:08:49 GMT

If you've been following the housing market lately, you've probably noticed a change in the headlines.

Inventory is rising. Home sales are slowing. Prices are beginning to soften.

Depending on what you read, you might think the housing market is headed for trouble.

But many of these headlines tell you what's happening without giving you enough context to understand what it means. And context matters when you're deciding whether to sell your home.

A 200% Increase Isn't Always a Big Deal

Let's say there was one home for sale in your neighborhood last year. Today, there are three.

That's a 200% increase in inventory. There are still only three homes for sale.

If there are ten qualified buyers looking for a home like yours, three listings might represent a very competitive market. If there's only one buyer, it's a different story.

The percentage increase is accurate in both cases. What it tells us about the market is entirely different.

This is why I spend less time worrying about percentage changes and more time looking at the actual number of homes competing for buyers and how quickly those homes are selling.

Buyers Are Pulling Back

According to Redfin's November 5 housing market report, pending home sales nationally declined 16.4% compared with the same period last year.

That's roughly 54,000 fewer pending transactions over the four-week reporting period.

Meanwhile, the number of homes actively listed for sale increased just 2.1%, and new listings declined 4.6% during the same period.

In other words, fewer homeowners are putting their properties on the market, but buyer activity has fallen even faster.

What About Home Prices?

The same Redfin report found that the national median home sale price declined 0.4% from a year earlier. On a $390,000 home, that's approximately $1,560.

The median sale price also doesn't tell us whether an individual home's value has increased or decreased.

If more expensive homes sell one month and fewer sell the next, the median price can decline even if the value of every individual property remains unchanged.

To understand whether home values are actually changing, we need to compare similar properties in similar locations.

A four-bedroom detached home in Alexandria doesn't compete with a condominium in Reston simply because they're both in Northern Virginia. Real estate is local, and it's competitive.

The Number I Pay the Most Attention To

When I'm advising someone about selling their home, one of the first things I want to understand is how many homes are competing for the same buyers. I also want to know how many of those homes are going under contract.

Consider two neighborhoods.

Neighborhood A: There are five homes for sale, and three went under contract this week.

Neighborhood B: There are twenty homes for sale, and two went under contract this week.

Both neighborhoods are producing sales, but they're very different markets.

In Neighborhood A, buyers are absorbing available inventory relatively quickly. In Neighborhood B, homes are accumulating faster than buyers are committing to purchase them.

Those differences matter when deciding how to price a home, when to bring it to market, and how much negotiating room a seller may have.

One week's activity isn't enough to draw a conclusion. I want to see how those numbers behave over several weeks and how they compare with the same period in previous years.

Days on Market Still Matters

Another number I pay close attention to is how long homes remain on the market before going under contract.

A home that sells in five days is telling us something different from one that takes sixty days.

If every comparable property is taking forty-five days to sell, a home that's been listed for thirty days may be performing perfectly well.

If competing homes are consistently selling in a week, thirty days without an acceptable offer deserves a closer look.

Price reductions tell us something, too. When sellers lower asking prices, they're responding to information the market is giving them. We also need to pay attention to homes that are withdrawn from the market without selling.

Those unsuccessful listings are part of the market story, even though they never appear in the closed-sales statistics.

So, Is Now a Good Time to Sell?

That's the question most homeowners really want answered, and the answer isn't going to come from a national headline about inventory rising 2% or prices falling 0.4%.

It depends on your home, your competition, the number of buyers looking for a property like yours, and what you're trying to accomplish.

Selling a home works the same way as selling any other asset, such as a stock. An investor sells when the money has a job to do, like funding retirement or buying something else. Whether the timing is right depends on that job, not on whether the market went up or down last month.

Your home is no different. If you're downsizing in the same area, the home you sell and the home you buy are priced in the same market, so a softer market affects both sides of the trade. If you're leaving the area or turning the proceeds into retirement income, the timing depends on what that money has to accomplish and when.

Define the goal first. The market numbers only mean something measured against it.

A homeowner with very little direct competition may be in an excellent position to sell, even when the broader market is slowing. Another homeowner, just a few miles away, may face an entirely different situation.

After more than thirty years selling homes in Northern Virginia, I've learned that the market doesn't reward or punish every property equally. It responds to the choices buyers have, and understanding those choices is far more useful than trying to predict where the entire housing market is headed.

Before You Decide, Understand Your Market

If you're thinking about selling, start with four questions:

What am I trying to accomplish by selling?
How many homes are currently competing with mine?
How many comparable homes are actually going under contract?
How long is it taking those homes to attract a buyer?

Those answers won't tell you everything, but they'll tell you considerably more than the latest national housing headline.

If you'd like to work through them for your home, start a conversation.

David Zadareky is a Northern Virginia residential real estate broker with more than 30 years of experience helping homeowners make informed decisions about buying and selling.

Source: Redfin National Housing Market Update, November 5, 2026. National figures cover the four weeks ending November 1, 2026. Local examples are illustrative, not actual neighborhood market statistics.