A good share of our sellers have been in the same house for two decades or more. They are usually in an excellent financial position and usually working from a set of assumptions formed the last time they moved, which was a different market with different rules.
Here is what has genuinely changed and what has not.
The first showing is now on a phone
Effectively every buyer sees your house on a screen before they see it in person, and they decide from that screen whether the in-person visit happens. This is the single biggest change since the early 2000s and it is not a marketing flourish.
What follows from it is that photography is not a cost to be minimised. It is the product. A house that is presented badly online gets fewer visits, and fewer visits is the mechanism by which a good house sits and then reduces. The reduction is usually blamed on the price. It was frequently the pictures.
Buyers have changed what they will forgive
Two decades ago buyers expected to do some work. Many now do not, and will discount heavily for work they can see rather than doing it. That is not a rational response, but it is a consistent one and it is what you are selling into.
The practical version: cosmetic work with a clear return — paint, floors, a deep clean, decluttering, fixing every small broken thing — pays for itself. Large speculative renovations before sale usually do not. Fixing the visible small things is where the money is, because the buyer who sees ten small unfixed things assumes fifty invisible ones.
Pre-inspection is worth considering
If your house is old enough to have surprises, finding them yourself first turns them into a set of known items rather than a negotiation from a position of weakness. The buyer's inspection will find them anyway. The only question is whether you find out at the same time as they do, with a contract already in place and leverage running the wrong way.
Your equity changes the strategy
Long tenure usually means substantial equity, which means you have options most sellers do not. You can be more patient. You can be more flexible on timing to make yourself attractive to a buyer with a constraint. You can buy before you sell in some circumstances, which is worth exploring properly rather than assuming.
The corresponding risk is anchoring. It is very natural to price against the peak number you remember hearing about your neighbourhood, and very easy to lose a whole selling season to it. The market pays what it pays, and it does not know what you paid or what your neighbour got two years ago.
What has not changed
Condition, price and presentation still decide the outcome, in that order. Everything else is detail.
If you are thinking about it for next year rather than next month, that is the right time to have the first conversation. There is usually a short list of things worth doing, and doing them at leisure costs a fraction of doing them under a deadline.