Selling your Edmonton home, with straight answers

The main costs are real estate commission, legal fees, and a current Real Property Report.

Commission is negotiable and is paid out of your sale proceeds at closing, not up front, and it normally covers both the listing side and the buyer's agent. Legal fees for a sale are usually a few hundred dollars less than for a purchase.

If your Real Property Report is out of date you will need a new one. Beyond that, budget for a mortgage discharge fee, and check whether breaking your mortgage term early triggers a penalty, because that is the cost that surprises people most. I will walk you through the full picture on your specific home before you list, so there are no surprises at the lawyer's office.

In most Alberta sales, yes. The seller is expected to provide a current Real Property Report with a municipal compliance stamp. This is a contract term rather than a law, and it can sometimes be handled with title insurance instead if the buyer and their lender agree.

An RPR is a survey showing your property boundaries and where every permanent structure sits, and the compliance stamp confirms the city agrees it all meets bylaws. If you have added a deck, a garage, a shed or a fence since your last RPR, it is probably out of date. Allow one to two weeks to get a new one, longer in spring and summer when surveyors are busy. This is worth sorting out before you list rather than three days before possession, which is when it usually surfaces.

If it has been your principal residence for the whole time you owned it, the gain is generally exempt from capital gains tax in Canada. You still report the sale on your tax return, even when the full exemption applies.

It gets more complicated if the property was a rental for part of the time, if you have owned more than one property, or if it is an estate sale, and those situations are genuinely worth a conversation with an accountant rather than a realtor. I will tell you when a question is outside my lane.

By looking at what comparable homes in your neighbourhood have actually sold for recently, not what they were listed at. Online estimate tools work off broad averages and public data. They do not know that your kitchen was redone two years ago, that the house backs onto a green space, or that the two similar listings down the street both sat unsold for ninety days.

I walk the home, look at recent comparable sales, factor in condition and current buyer demand, and give you a range with the reasoning behind it. If the honest number is lower than you hoped, I would rather tell you that at the kitchen table than have the market tell you over the following two months.