When getting ready to sell your home, it can be hard to know what renovations will get your property sold the fastest and for the most amount of money. Should you replace your furnace or redo your kitchen? Should you gut your bathroom or add another one? Should you get your roof done or buy new appliances? And of course, most importantly, how much money are you going to recoup on the sales price if you do make the investment? First and foremost, you should call your Realtor (TTL Team!) for a consultation, even if you don’t plan on selling for some time. It’s important to invest in the things that will actually bring more market value to your home. In our experience, the homes that sell fastest and for the highest are homes that have little to no deferred maintenance over the years. Given that, below is a list of your most worthwhile renovations when it comes to getting your home ready for the market.
Painting, Both Interior and Exterior
Return: 100% +
Painting is one of the easiest, fastest and cheapest ways to get your home ready for the market. Most painting jobs add more than 100% back of what it costs to the sales price, so long as they are done with precision and clean lines. Getting your home painted is well worth your time and money. A word of caution though! If you pick the wrong color/s or use the wrong sheen, you may damage the buyer’s emotional response to your home and actually do the opposite of what you are trying to do. Likewise, doing the painting yourself in order to save money will cost you a lot of time, and could possibly cost you in the final sales price if you don’t do a professional-looking job. We highly recommend hiring a professional to do the painting. In addition, it is best to consult with your realtor before picking the paint colors. Here at TTL Team we meet with a color consultant and lean on our many years of prepping homes for the market to choose the right color for every room. A well placed accent wall with colors that echo or repeat outside the window or in the staging adds to the over-all presentation of the home. A well presented home has buyer’s falling in love the minute they walk through the door. One sour note can spoil the effect.
Curb Appeal: Exterior painting and GARDEN
Return: more than 100%
Curb appeal is huge when it comes to buying and selling real estate. So getting the outside of your home in tip top shape can lure in the most amount of buyers. The more attention your home gets during the marketing period, the more chance of getting multiple offers on offer day. When buyer’s compete, sellers benefit.
Simple things like landscaping or new potted plants aid in the outside appeal of your home with almost 100% return on investment. Taking care of any repairs that jump out to the naked eye as you first approach the home, should be addressed and corrected, especially severe dry rot around the garage doors, or uneven sidewalk/walkways. Here in the Bay Area, the garden, both front and back is a huge feature of any home and will always bring significant return on investment.
Entry Door
Return: 100%
It seems like a minor upgrade but can make a huge difference when getting your home ready for the market. Again, as with painting, you will want to look for neutral colors that blend well with the outside facade of your home. You want clean lines and a fresh feel to your front porch, as prospective buyers first impressions are crucial. The way it feels to open the door has a large impact on the emotional response of the buyer to the house. A solid, stylish, well functioning door and doorknob go a long way towards first impressions. When people see a home on line, they experience how it looks. When they go in person, they take in the home with ALL of their senses. How the door knob feels and how the door swings on the hinges feed them information on the workmanship on the house as a whole.
Additional Square Footage
Return: 70%-80%
Most homeowners want more space. And adding an additional room or two will make your home a lot more appealing on the market. So if your home is on the smaller side, especially when it comes to comparables, then it might make sense to add additional space. That said, the cost of pushing construction outside the current footprint of the house, both in dollars and in time, often does not come close to making financial sense if you are doing it as preparation for the sale. If you are adding to your home that you intend on living in longer term, this is a great way to add value to your home over time.
Bathroom Addition
Return: 60% – 100%+
You have two options when it comes to bathrooms, you can renovate the one you have or add an additional one. For most families, one bathroom might be a deal breaker, so from both a logical and financial perspective, it would make the most sense to add an additional bathroom. If you already have 2 bathrooms or more, then adding another bathroom will have little to no impact on the final sales price, and is money best spent elsewhere in the home preparation process.
Minor Kitchen Remodel
Return: more than 100%
There is a big difference between a minor and a major kitchen remodel. Most minor kitchen remodeling will run you around $25K, and a major one could be double that. Doing the lower end of the remodeling can still leave you with a really nice kitchen. TTL Team is particularly adept at overseeing budget friendly kitchen updates (and bathroom updates) where we give the room a new more modern that more than pay for themselves at the end of the day. We can typically get it done in 3-4 weeks from the day we receive keys to your empty home, to hitting the market.
Bathroom Refresh
Return: 100%
Similar to refreshing the kitchen, TTL Team has overseen hundreds of bathroom refresh projects that have more than doubled their return. Since homes in some very popular towns and neighborhoods in the inner East Bay (Albany, many parts of Berkeley and Oakland for example), are typically smaller than what folks from other areas are accustomed to, refreshing the one or two bathrooms is key to realizing the full potential sales price of your home, as is refreshing the Kitchen. We have deep relationships with our vendors spanning decades, and can quickly get a homeowner in touch with quality vendors and tradespeople.
Replacement Roof
Return: 68%
If your roof has 5 or more years of life left and is not actively leaking, then in our market, it is better to invest the money you would spend on a new roof on something that will give you a better return. While it is definitely a plus to be able to tell buyers that the roof is new, it is not an improvement that brings the biggest bang for your buck. There are other more important things to address before replacing the roof. If the rest of the house is in good repair and the finishes inside the home are current, but the roof is nearing the end of it’s life, then investing in the roof may be of some benefit. Our team is hesitant to recommend a prep investment that won’t bring in more than it costs.
Conclusion
There are definitely things you can do before going on the market that can impact how much money your home sells for. Unfortunately, we have seen cases where homeowners take on these improvements without consulting with a Realtor first. More often than not, they end up investing significant amounts of money on improvements that don’t actually affect the final sales price, while missing the prep essentials that will always make a home show better and draw in more interested parties. When we represent buyers, we always look for the homes that haven’t been prepped, that are poorly marketed, and that are attempting to sell while still owner occupied, because those homes will almost always be a good deal for our buyer. For our sellers, we emphasize the importance of professional pre-marketing prep in your ability to realize more of your homes true equity.
Sources
The Paint Colors that can Boost Your Homes Value
These 15 Home Renovations Have The Highest Return on Investment
Which Home Improvements Pay Off?
Deck Building: What Will Be Your Return On Investment?