MW Selling a parent's home can be painful. 'Stressed and sad' adult children share their tips for getting through it.

By Aarthi Swaminathan

More homeowners over 60 are selling their property. Here are four tips for helping aging parents put their homes on the market.

Selling their parents' home on Long Island in New York was an unexpectedly smooth process for Shara Seigel and her brother - until it was time to pack everything up.

They knew that spring was the best time to sell, and the three-bedroom single-family home was in a desirable school district. Within 10 days of listing the property, they were pleasantly surprised by an offer that was $40,000 over the asking price. The siblings wanted their parents, who are in their early 70s, to move closer to them. They found a condominium unit upstate near Seigel's brother's place in Putnam County that they liked and could fund with the proceeds of the sale of the Long Island home.

But what they didn't expect was the emotional toll of the home-selling process, from approaching the topic of selling to preparing the property listing to packing up.

"Tensions are high," Seigel, a 40-year-old communications professional, told MarketWatch. "Everyone's pretty stressed and sad. There are just a lot of lasts."

Seigel's family's experience illustrates how sensitive the process of selling a home can be at a time when an increasing number of older homeowners are expected to do so - often with their children's help - due to concerns about advancing age.

Data on the number of adult children selling their parents' homes is hard to find. In general, though, home sellers are increasingly likely to be older: The median age of a homeowner selling a property rose to 63 last year, the highest since the National Association of Realtors began tracking the data in 2013. The most common reasons for selling among sellers 60 and older were wanting to move closer to family and friends and wanting to downsize.

Experts in recent years had projected that a so-called silver tsunami of aging homeowners either passing away or downsizing would flood the housing market with millions of homes, but more recent figures suggest that empty nesters aren't leaving their homes at the rates previously expected. In fact, in a survey of homeowners 66 and older, about 63% said that they would definitely not move to a new home, according to Redfin survey results provided to MarketWatch. Asked when they would consider selling their current home, 36% said "never."

"It's probably going to be more like a slow rising of the tide instead of this wave," Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin $(RDFN)$, a real-estate brokerage, told MarketWatch.

But even a modestly rising tide of available homes would be considered a godsend for younger buyers priced out of the current housing market. Housing affordability has worsened significantly over the last few years due to elevated prices and mortgage rates.

Still, packing up and selling the family home can take a greater emotional toll than people anticipate. MarketWatch spoke to real-estate agents and economists, as well as adult children selling their parents' homes, to understand the common pain points people face as they go through the process - and how they can be mitigated.

Mismatched expectations

One common problem is mismatched expectations. Parents and adult children often disagree on reasons to sell the house, or on where an elderly parent would live after selling.

"To avoid conflict like that, all decision makers need to be aligned with the pricing and the agent that they're going to hire, because that's where the conflict arises," Gabriela Venegas, a Los Angeles real-estate agent with Keller Williams, told MarketWatch. Venegas, who has been in the industry for more than 15 years, said 10% to 20% of her sales involve parents and their adult children.

When Shannon Schulz first approached her aging father about selling his home of two decades, he was skeptical. The 81-year-old Air Force veteran's recent health issues had prompted Schulz, his only child, to think about selling. He lived 90 minutes away in San Antonio - a significant distance to cover in an emergency.

Again, selling the house wasn't the hard part. She received an offer soon after listing the home in early May, and the deal was set to close at some point in June. She hadn't had to offer a major price cut, even though competition was tough: San Antonio saw a 20% jump in new listings in May as compared with May 2024, according to research from Realtor.com. (Realtor.com is operated by News Corp subsidiary Move Inc., and MarketWatch publisher Dow Jones is also a subsidiary of News Corp.)

The hardest parts were convincing her father to move out and getting the home listing ready. When she first broached the topic, he would not even entertain the possibility of selling the house and moving out, she said. "He was very much in the belief system that his health would recover," Schulz said. "It wasn't until he had this moment in time where his health did change significantly, and he knew it. ... It became a relevant conversation to have."

Then there was the slog of getting the home ready for the buyer. Since Schulz and her father got the offer on the house, they have been working on the buyer's requests for repairs and improvements to the property.

"We are probably at the most painful point" right now, she said, as she makes multiple trips a week between San Antonio and her home in Austin - a nearly 180-mile round trip. "The process of managing the preparation of the house from a distance ... [has] been the most challenging for us."

Selling a parent's home? Follow these 4 tips to make it a smooth process.

How should one approach an elderly parent who is reluctant to sell their home? What are the common mistakes people make when trying to sell a parent's home, and how can they avoid them? Here's what experts and sellers recommended:

Clear out the junk - but keep emotional attachments in mind: Sellers who spoke with MarketWatch said that clearing out a home that had been lived in for decades was a lengthy process that people should start sooner rather than later.

"In order to actually have it be presentable, there's just so much work that had to be done: junk removal, painting, a lot of things that were broken needed to be repaired," Seigel said.

Two-thirds of Americans over the age of 55 who are selling their home said they are emotionally attached to it, according to data from Opendoor, a real-estate company. About 56% of sellers over 55 have lived in their homes for 15 years or more.

"For those selling their parent's home, keep these emotions in mind," Bryson Taggart, an expert on real-estate trends at Opendoor, told MarketWatch.

Be clear about what the parent wants: It's important to have clarity on what the parent's goals are and how to achieve them. "It needs to be an ongoing discussion. The earlier you can have it, the better," Venegas said. "The last thing you want is a parent breaking a hip, or [needing] to go into assisted living, and then everything just becomes emotionally heightened because everything feels rushed."

It's also ideal if both parents and adult children are aligned on matters such as whether to sell and how much to sell the home for before starting the process. Jeanne Frederick, a Las Vegas-based global luxury property specialist at Coldwell Banker, told MarketWatch that agents worry about older people being manipulated. "We have to do a lot more listening and ask really good questions," she said, because "the elderly can be taken advantage of so quickly." Frederick is also trained as a "Seniors Real Estate Specialist," a designation created by the NAR.

"Sometimes it's their own family, [and] sometimes it's friends - so it is important to me to be a layer of protection," she added.

Fix any problems you've identified: Elderly parents may have neglected to fix a leaky roof or a faulty pipe, and those factors could severely impact the value of the home, so take care of such repairs before listing the house for sale, Venegas said.

Ryan Sparks is trying to sell his parents' home in Jupiter, Fla. In a previous interview with MarketWatch, he said that, even though his dad had been a general contractor when he was alive, the house still needed little fixes before it was ready to hit the market - "things I didn't even realize were potential issues" until seeing the inspection report, he said.

Change the air filters, make sure the lightbulbs are working, and ensure the property and landscaping are well-maintained. "It's more about putting together a fresh, clean home," Frederick said.

But also "avoid any major renovations, other than maybe a refresh of the paint," Venegas added. "You can't anticipate something a buyer is going to want. The most important thing is making the house [the] best as it can [be] in its current state."

Have realistic expectations about the sale price: Pricing an aging parent's home fairly is also very important, according to experts.

"The misconception that a lot of older clients have is that they'll price high and leave room for negotiation," Venegas said. But that actually works against clients, because buyers will think the seller is not realistic, so the house sits on the market for longer than intended, she said.

What's more, Opendoor's Taggart added, "if you don't price a home correctly when it first lists, price cuts will often become steeper as the home remains on the market."

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-Aarthi Swaminathan

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June 13, 2025 15:33 ET (19:33 GMT)

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