Should you clean the carpets before selling a house?
Carpet shows up in listing photos and in the first breath a buyer takes at the door. How to decide between cleaning and replacing, where the clean belongs in the run-up to listing, and what else is worth doing on the same day.
Usually, yes, and before the photographs rather than after. Flattened, stained pile reads dark and tired in listing photos, and buyers notice smell at a showing before they notice anything else. Clean the carpet once the painting and repairs are finished, leave time for it to dry, and ask your agent about any that should be replaced instead.
This post is for sellers. If you are a tenant handing back keys, the rules and the expectations are different, and what a move-out clean actually covers is the better read.
Clean or replace: how do you decide?
Clean the carpet if the problem is soil, spills, flattened traffic lanes or smell held in the pile. Talk about replacing it if the problem is damage to the fibre or the backing, because no cleaning method fixes that.
| What you see | Clean it | Consider replacing |
|---|---|---|
| Grey traffic lanes, general dullness | Yes | |
| Spots and spills | Yes, most lift | If many are set and dyed in |
| Everyday pet and cooking smell | Yes | |
| Pet urine in the pad | Treat it, or replace that section | If it is widespread |
| Bleach spots, burns, sun fading | Yes, it is colour loss or damage | |
| Backing showing through, fraying, ripples | Yes | |
| Musty smell from a damp basement | Fix the damp first | Often, the pad as well |
The carpet industry's trade body, the Carpet and Rug Institute, says in its consumer cleaning tips that a good professional cleaning should include vacuuming, a pre-spray and spot removal. That is the work that brings back traffic lanes and lifts most spots. It is not the work that fixes a thin spot at the top of the stairs.
Pet urine deserves its own line. A house can smell fine to the people who live in it and smell of the cat to everyone else. If there are old accident spots, find them and deal with them properly, as described in how to get pet urine smell out of carpet. A general clean over the top of urine in the pad tends to bring the smell back up as the carpet dries.
Should you do it yourself? You can, for a room or two of lightly soiled synthetic carpet, if you have time and can keep the house empty while it dries. The risk before a listing is timing. A rented machine puts in more water than it takes back, so the carpet stays damp longer, and a carpet that is still drying when the photographer arrives shows darker patches and smells of wet carpet. Detergent left in the pile also makes it re-soil quickly over weeks of showings. The trade-offs are laid out in renting a carpet cleaner vs hiring a professional. If you rent, finish with plain-water rinse passes and several dry passes, and do it well before the photo day, not the evening before.
Whether new carpet is worth it, and whether any of this changes the sale, is a conversation for your agent. Nobody can honestly promise a cleaning will change an offer. What it does is take one obvious objection out of the photos and the showings.
When in the listing timeline should it happen?
Last among the messy jobs, first before the camera. The carpet clean belongs after painting, repairs and decluttering, and before the stager, the photographer and the first showing.
A workable order:
- Declutter and pack. Fewer things on the floor means more carpet gets cleaned and less gets worked around.
- Paint and repair. Ladders, drop sheets and trades' boots undo a carpet clean in an afternoon. Do the dust-making work first.
- Fix any water problem. A damp basement carpet will not stay fresh, and cleaning it adds moisture to a problem that already has too much.
- General clean. Walls, baseboards, windows and kitchens. Dust falls, so the floor goes last.
- Carpets, rugs and upholstery. One visit, once the trades are out.
- Drying time. Leave the rest of the day, at least, before staging or photos. What affects drying is covered in how long carpet takes to dry.
- Staging and photographs. Furniture goes back on a dry carpet.
- Keep it that way. Mats at the doors and a shoes-off sign for showings.
If you are still living in the house, book the clean for a day you can stay off the floors, and keep the main rooms tidy afterwards. It is easier to protect a clean carpet for a few weeks of showings than to clean it twice.
What else gets cleaned at the same time?
Anything soft that shows in the photos or holds a smell: stairs, area rugs, sofas and chairs, and the basement carpet. One visit covers all of them, and the machine is already in the house.
- Stairs. The nosings go grey first and buyers look down as they climb.
- Area rugs. Rugs are often the centrepiece of a staged photo, as in the picture at the top of this post. Wool and hand-knotted rugs need a different method from broadloom.
- Sofas and chairs. A sofa with a dark headrest line or pet hair in the seams draws the eye in a living room shot, whether or not it is staying.
- The basement. Buyers sniff basements. A clean, dry basement carpet removes one thing for an inspector or a nervous buyer to wonder about.
- Mattresses. Not in the photos, but if the house will be shown furnished, bedrooms smell of what is in them.
How carpet cleaning is priced, and what changes the number, is in what carpet cleaning costs in Toronto.
Book it before the photographer
One visit can cover carpets, stairs, rugs and a sofa before the photographer arrives, with the price confirmed before work starts. Tell us the listing date when you call 647-697-7435 or request a free quote, so the clean lands after the trades and with time to dry. AllCleaner's carpet cleaning is hot water extraction with pre-treatment on traffic lanes and spots, and the solutions are safe around children and pets once dry.
Short answers.
- Will cleaning hide pet odour from buyers?
- It removes what is in the pile, and that is most of the everyday smell of a house with pets. It does not hide urine that has soaked into the underlay, which comes back as the carpet dries or on a humid day. If there are old urine spots, have them found and treated properly, or replace that section, before the first showing.
- Should the stairs and the basement carpet be done too?
- Usually, yes. Stairs carry the heaviest traffic in the house and show grey on the nosings first, and they are often the first carpet a buyer walks on. A basement carpet is where buyers sniff for damp, so a fresh clean there helps, as long as there is no water problem underneath it. If there is, that needs fixing first.
- Is it worth cleaning carpet that the buyer may rip out?
- Often, because the buyer decides after seeing it, not before. Clean carpet looks like a choice the buyer can keep or change. Stained, flattened carpet looks like a job they will have to do, and that impression spreads to the rest of the house. If the carpet is worn through or damaged, talk to your agent about replacing it instead.
Filed under Moving and renovation. More in the blog.
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