Build my campaign plan
Tell us who lives in the property, where you are in the campaign and what is creating the most pressure. We will prioritise the next practical steps.
Selling while you still live there
Keep living. Keep selling. Without resetting your whole life every weekend.
A practical campaign guide for owner-occupiers and renters living in a property while it is being sold — from decluttering systems and inspection routines to privacy, cleaning and keeping the home manageable between opens.
Choose how to use this resource
Build a plan for your household — or read the complete guide.
The personalised pathway turns your campaign situation into a working plan. The full guide explains the systems that make living through a sale more sustainable, including a dedicated Victorian renter section.
Show me the full guide
Skip the questions and explore the complete method for maintaining a sale-ready home while normal life continues around it.
Personalise your campaign
What does living through this sale look like?
We will change the plan depending on whether you own or rent the home, whether the campaign is already live, and the biggest source of day-to-day pressure.
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Your campaign priority
Use this plan for the campaign systems. For the actual hour before each inspection, use ExitMaid's Open Home Ready Checklist rather than repeating the whole campaign plan.
The sustainable campaign
Do not try to live in a permanently perfect house.
Selling while still living in the property is a maintenance problem, not a one-off presentation problem. The useful goal is to create systems that let the home return to inspection-ready condition quickly without every open home consuming the household.
Reduce volume once
Pack early, remove excess furniture and move low-use possessions off-site so there is simply less to manage throughout the campaign.
Give daily life a home
Create deliberate places for school bags, laundry, chargers, paperwork, toys and pet gear so they can disappear quickly before inspections.
Maintain the clean
Occupied homes need recurring kitchen, bathroom, toilet and floor refreshes. Protect the initial pre-sale clean rather than waiting for build-up to become another deep-cleaning project.
Use one exit routine
Have the same final sequence for every open: refresh, declutter, lights, blinds, bins, pets, valuables, cars and final doorway check.
Before the campaign starts
Create breathing room before buyers arrive.
The easiest campaign clutter to manage is the clutter that has already been packed away. Use the pre-launch period to make everyday life simpler, not just prettier.
Pack low-use belongings early.
Seasonal clothes, collections, excess kitchenware, spare linen, books and non-essential décor can move before the household does. Label boxes by destination so early packing does not create work later.
Edit furniture for circulation.
Removing one oversized or unnecessary piece can improve buyer movement and also give the household fewer surfaces and obstacles to maintain.
Create a private-items system.
Choose a secure plan for medication, documents, jewellery, devices and items you do not want visible during inspections. Avoid randomly hiding valuables around the property.
Finish disruptive work first.
Repairs, patching, painting and trade work should ideally be completed before the detailed pre-sale clean and photography preparation.
Open Pre-Sale Preparation Guide →Living between inspections
Reset small things daily. Reset the property before the open.
The campaign becomes harder when every inspection starts with several days of accumulated dishes, bathroom build-up, laundry and floor mess. Small maintenance habits dramatically reduce the final reset.
Kitchen: close it down each night.
Run the dishwasher, clear the sink, wipe the cooktop and benches and avoid letting recycling or household overflow establish itself on presentation surfaces.
Bathrooms: protect the original clean.
Ventilate after showers, remove hair and obvious water residue, keep vanity clutter contained and deal with fresh shower-glass marks before they accumulate.
Floors: maintenance matters.
Vacuum high-traffic areas as needed and deal with spills or obvious hard-floor marks promptly. Before an open, refresh the floors properly rather than treating vacuuming as an optional styling task.
Night-before beats morning-of.
Do laundry, dishes, major tidying and family logistics the night before where possible. Inspection morning should be a refresh and presentation reset, not a household rescue mission.
Use the Open Home Ready Checklist →Kids, pets & actual life
Build the campaign around the household you actually have.
Use departure baskets
Give each person a basket or bag for the final daily items that need to leave with them: chargers, toiletries, school items, devices and small clutter.
Rotate toys
Keep a smaller usable selection accessible and pack the rest. A child can still live normally without the entire toy collection needing to be reset before every inspection.
Plan pets before open day
Decide where pets, bowls, bedding, litter and leads go during inspections. Deal with fur and odour as maintenance issues throughout the week.
Protect one calm zone
Keep at least one area functional between opens rather than turning every room into temporary storage for displaced belongings.
Victorian renters
Living there during a sale does not erase your rental rights.
The owner can sell a rented property, but Victorian rules govern notice, inspection frequency, compensation and advertising photography. Use the official Consumer Affairs Victoria guidance if anything about the campaign arrangements is unclear.
Sale notice comes before buyer inspections.CAV says a renter must be told the owner intends to sell at least 14 days before the first entry to show the property to prospective buyers, using the prescribed Notice of intention to sell.
Buyer inspections require notice and have limits.CAV states at least 48 hours' written notice is required to show the property to buyers. Reasonable efforts must be made to agree on days and times; without a different agreement, buyer inspections are limited to no more than twice a week and no longer than one hour each.
Sales inspections are compensated.CAV states renters must be compensated for each sales inspection at half a day's rent or $30, whichever is greater.
Advertising photography has separate rules.CAV states at least 7 days' written notice is required for advertising photos/video. There are also protections around certain identifying, sensitive or high-value possessions appearing in advertising.
You usually cannot be required to leave.CAV says renters generally cannot be required to leave simply because the property is being shown, although many households may choose to be out for convenience.
Use the right resource at the right moment
This guide manages the campaign. The other tools handle the deadlines.
Rather than duplicating the resources you've already used, move into the specialist tool when the campaign reaches that moment.
Pre-Sale Preparation
For the broader work before the campaign launches.
Open guide →Photography & Styling
For the specific deadline before photography and staging.
Open guide →Open Home Ready
For the fast, repeatable reset immediately before each buyer inspection.
Open checklist →Moving Out
When the campaign becomes a move, switch into the dedicated moving-out planner.
Open moving-out guide →Need help maintaining the campaign?
You do not have to personally reset every bathroom and floor before every open.
When an occupied campaign runs for several weeks, maintaining the presentation can become another recurring household job. ExitMaid CampaignCare is designed around that gap.
ExitMaid CampaignCarePresentation-focused cleaning support for properties actively on the market — helping maintain kitchens, bathrooms, floors, glass and the overall campaign standard between photography, inspections and key sale moments.
