Should you fully renovate before you sell? Probably not, and here's why...
It's the question we get more than any other, and the honest answer in the current Brisbane market is usually no. Trade availability is still stretched following the post-2020 building boom, materials pricing hasn't returned to pre-2020 levels and isn't expected to, and the gap between what a renovation costs and what it adds to your eventual sale price has narrowed to the point where overcapitalisation is the rule rather than the exception in our patch.
The numbers we see consistently. Sellers spending $80,000 on a kitchen and bathroom refresh and recovering perhaps $50,000 of it at sale, with three months of stress, contractor delays and disruption thrown in. Sellers committing to $200,000 of structural work hoping to add $400,000 in value, and getting back $150,000 after the market judges the finish quality differently than they did. The exceptions exist, like a genuinely tired property in a strong street where a modest cosmetic refresh genuinely transforms presentation can pay back. But these are exceptions, not the pattern, and they need to be identified before you spend, not hoped for after.
The better question for most sellers is which small things to address and which to leave for the next owner to put their own stamp on. Buyers in the Inner West are sophisticated, many are renovators themselves or have a builder in the family, and most are factoring future renovation into their offer regardless of what you do beforehand.
The work that consistently pays back is presentation, not renovation. Clean, declutter, repaint where it genuinely needs it, fix the obvious maintenance, and let buyers project their own vision onto the rest. We work through this on a property-by-property basis using recent comparable sales, not generic advice. If you're sitting on the renovate-or-sell question and want a real answer before you commit to either, book an appraisal and we'll walk through the numbers with you.