While the state that your home is in drastically affects the resale value, just fixing every downside of your home is not a good solution to this problem. Why? Well, when selling your home immediately afterward, you’re trying to earn more. Spending $8,000 to fix a roof only to increase the value of the home by $4,000 is hardly a good bargain. Still, there are two scenarios in which even this decision would be completely viable.
# First, if you don’t plan to sell right away. The energy efficiency and lifestyle quality improvement (for the time you spend there) could potentially pay off.
# Second, if no one wants to buy a home with a roof in a ruinous state. In this scenario, losing a bit of money to manage to sell the home (at all) is a good trade-off.
As you can see, planning a home improvement for boosting resale value and doing so to increase the quality of life in your home is not the same thing. Here’s what you need to know to incrase the value of your home before selling it.
Renovate or Repair
One of the biggest challenges that you’ll face is the ones regarding renovation vs repair. Usually, the repair is a better solution to increase the resale value of the home, while a replacement (renovation) is better for those who intend to stay living there.
Also, these things tend to depend on the original element. For instance, if we’re talking about windows. A single-pane window is incredibly inefficient, and there’s only so much you can do with it. Replacing it with a double-pane window can save you hundreds of dollars every year. The potential buyer is more than aware of that.
However, if you already have double-glazing windows, all you need to do is look up how to repair old windows. This is, arguably, the method that will give you the greatest resale boost.
While you can make these assessments individually, you can also look up some suggestions online. For instance, fixing your garage doors (just oiling them up or replacing a couple of parts in the mechanism) can give you a disproportionally large boost in the home’s resale value.
There are a lot of these potential opportunities. The bottom line is that when planning to increase the resale value of your home, you should stick to minor improvements. So, no major bathroom renovation or roofing. Even though these two projects would massively increase the value of your home, the ROI wouldn’t be particularly good. Minor and aesthetic improvements are usually what drive the value up while not requiring too big of an investment.
Making the Home Greener
This part is a bit controversial, seeing as how a lot of people tend to misinterpret what making a home greener means. Is replacing all your windows green? Absolutely! Is it the only way to prevent hot air loss in your home? Nope!
By identifying and sealing all the gaps, you’ll drastically increase the energy efficiency of your home. Then, you save this heating bill and present it to a potential buyer. This way, you’ve achieved a similar effect with just a fraction of the investment.
Being self-reliable is also a huge hit, but it takes between 9 and 20 years for solar panels to pay themselves off. So, if you don’t already have them, it’s a horrible idea to install them to drive the price up (it’s a great idea if you plan to stay there, though). At the same time, you don’t have to have your entire household run this way. A solar-powered water heater, for instance, can pay itself off in as little as two years. So, if you don’t plan to sell the place right away, it’s one of your best options. So, even if you have to look for a loan in order to finance this investment, it will likely be worth your while.
Cleaning and Decluttering
Clutter can conceal some of your home’s best features, but it’s not as effective in hiding its flaws. Sure, a huge pile of trash may hide a crack in the wall, but it’s:
# In no way better than the crack in question.
# Not tricking anyone, seeing as how people would expect something along those lines in a cluttered home.
Therefore, decluttering needs to be one of your priorities.
Moreover, it’s important that you keep in mind the fact that decluttering creates more space, which further enhances the buyer’s immersion. What does this mean? Well, it’s a lot easier for them to imagine adding their stuff when they see a space rather than have to do mental gymnastics and imagine how the place would look stripped bare. To sell, you want them to see themselves living in the place as if it was their home.
Keeping the place clean is another priority. You see, it’s not just about hygiene. Even if the place is completely sanitary, chances are that they’ll start cleaning it as soon as they move in (it’s a psychological thing, as well as a thing of trust).
When they see a home that’s not very hygienic, they’ll start developing negative emotions toward the place right away. This is the last thing you want when selling anything.
It will also raise suspicion. In their mind, if you can’t clean the home when you’re expecting potential buyers, you must have been negligent regarding the home’s maintenance all those years. The worst part is that this logic holds up.
Wrap Up
The starting point is developing the right mindset for this project. In order for this to work, you need to understand what you’re trying to achieve. You’re not interested in the comfort that the home provides but in the way in which perceived comfort appeals to the potential buyer. You’re not interested in the heating bill but in the increase in the home’s value that comes with this reduced heating bill. In other words, once you understand what you’re trying to accomplish, things will be a lot easier to manage.
