Cleaning windows before you sell your house

When agents tell sellers what to do before a house goes on the market, cleaning comes second only to decluttering. In the National Association of REALTORS’ 2025 staging survey, 91 percent of agents recommended decluttering and 88 percent an entire-home cleaning.

Windows do not get a line of their own in that survey; they are part of the clean. They matter more than their share of the checklist because they are in the photos, and the photos are what buyers look at most online. Among recent buyers who searched online, 81 percent rated the photos very useful, more than any other feature of the listings they used.

The photos come first

In a listing photo the windows are often the brightest thing in the frame. Spots and streaks you stopped noticing years ago show up against the light, and a view through clean glass is part of what the photo is selling. So clean before the photographer comes, not before the first showing.

What to do, in order

1. Declutter first, window sills included, so the glass can be reached and nothing on the sills ends up in the photos.
2. Clean the windows inside and out, with the screens, tracks and sills, a week or so before the photos.
3. Once the glass is clean, look at every double-pane window. Fog or streaks between the panes mean the seal has failed, and that is better found by you than by the buyer’s inspector.
4. After a stretch of wind or rain, touch up the outside glass before the first showings.

Selling in the spring

Spring and early summer listings meet the valley’s dirtiest windows: road grit left by the thaw, then cottonwood fluff in the screens. The best time of year to wash windows in Bozeman has the calendar, and what a professional cleaning includes has the checklist.