What Home Improvement Projects Have Big and Small Impact on My Home's Value?

If you decide that you are ready to sell or have the goal to sell down the road, you will more than likely want to get the best possible price. You will either hear or read lots of advice on preparing the house for a quick, profitable sale, from making all the necessary repairs to staging. However, it is important to consider potential benefits of improving your home's design to increase the beauty, appeal, and utility of the living space. Since improvements impact home value more than others, it is important to understand the value of enhancements you make.

In this article, we will take a close look at which home improvements have big and small impacts on your home's value.

Beneficial Home Improvements

1. A Home Office Space

The days of the pandemic encouraged many to work from home, while different entrepreneurs have always maintained home office spaces. Research indicates creating a dedicated home office space can boost the appeal of your home substantially. Resist the urge to convert other important spaces like your garage into a home office. Buyers expect a home to include other usable spaces as well, even if they don't end up parking in the garage. For this reason, converting your garage will hurt the resale value instead of helping it. Instead, you can modify your basement or attic space.

2. Eye-Catching Light and Paint

Painting your home's exterior and interior will offer a major resale value, while also making the rooms and hallways look all the more inviting to prospective buyers. Clever home staging techniques include painting a home in strategic neutral colors like white, ivory, beige, and gray. Neutral colors combined with a sparse arrangement of furniture can help home shoppers envision their own families and belongings in the home's space.

Modified or new light fixtures can make your freshly-painted interior look more cheerful. Moderately-priced lighting fixtures look just as appealing as high-end light fixtures, allowing you to increase your ROI. Prospective buyers love homes with features like recessed lighting, automated timers, and dimmer switches. LED lights provide an additional appeal of long life and tremendous energy efficiency.

3. Beautiful Flooring

New flooring can breathe new life into the interior of your home, yielding a solid return on your remodeling investments. However, this only applies if you select the right flooring material to work with. Clay tile will provide a higher ROI than porcelain tile, as the latter requires professional installation. Wood flooring provides the highest ROI and can add an extra 2.5% of your home's value.

We recommend thinking twice before committing to selecting luxury flooring options, like marble tile, thinking it will bring in a higher asking price. Prospective buyers tend to lean toward hard-wear materials that require less maintenance and offer easy replacements if they should become damaged.

4. Long-Lasting New Roof

A roof replacement represents a major investment. It can pay big dividends if you are looking to sell your home. A new roof can boost the home sellers' asking price by a few thousand dollars. The appeal of a new roof shouldn't need replacing for decades, and it can help you sell your home more quickly to an enthusiastic pool of buyers, allowing you to start the bidding at a high price point.

5. Enhancements to Your Exterior

An attractive new roof offers one way of increasing the home's curb appeal and resale value. Anything you do to improve the exterior's beauty will yield dramatic results. Consider the national average value added when installing new siding and windows. For example, fiber-cement siding can increase your home's value by as much as $13k, but vinyl siding can raise the value by $11k.

6. Stunning Landscaping

Curb appeal requires more than fresh-looking exterior and a beautiful roof. It will include the visual impact of your lawn and garden on prospective buyers. A beautiful landscaped property will communicate the owner has tended the home with care. To gain benefits from your landscaping efforts, we recommend equipping your exterior walkway, porch, and driveway with exterior lights. Prospective buyers will like the safety and security lighting it provides.

Skip-It Home Improvements

1. Installing a Swimming Pool

If you think that installing a large luxury swimming pool will increase the value of the home, think again. The extra expense and trouble prospective buyers will endure to operate and maintain the pool isn't worth the hassle to many. Buyers might instead prefer a pool-free home, so don't waste money on this project to increase the value of the property.

2. Cutting Down Living Space

Converting a bedroom into a closet or home gym seems like a good idea now, but these types of projects rarely yield a ROI return, as they are removing livable space in the home. What happens if a prospective buyer doesn't need the extra closet space but would like a bedroom instead?

3. Installing Wall-to-Wall Carpet

Wall-to-wall carpet is expensive and difficult to maintain and clean, so it isn't wise to make such an investment. Instead, people are opting to use rugs to create warmth without the commitment to full carpeting. This allows future homeowners to make their own decisions on flooring instead of needing to rip up carpeting.

Conclusion

In hindsight, we hope that these home improvement ideas give you a clear route to how you can boost your asking price by adding value to your home, instead of taking it away. Consider taking a step to ensure you get top dollar for your home. With the help of a trusted real estate agent who can provide insight on what prospective buyers in your area are looking for, making improvements to increase the value of your home will be smooth sailing. Trust the real estate professionals at Benchmark Realty to guide you in finding and settling down in the home of your dreams in the many beautiful historic neighborhoods that make up Nashville, TN, today.