Center Street Lending shares a brief presentation exploring how to increase the value of your home with expert advice.

1. Increase
the Value
of Your
Home
with
Expert
Advice

2. What are the best home
improvements to make, that
increase the value of my home?

3. Ultimately, you aren’t just
embarking on your improvement
project to increase your standard of
living, you’d hope that there would
be some return on your investment
as well in terms of an appreciation
in the value of your home.

4. Unfortunately, the question of
which are the best home
improvements is one where there is
no one size fits all answer, and it
would be foolish for us to assume
that.

5. It will depend on many factors such
as the location of your home,
preferences of the local market, the
state of the economy, interest rates,
and you could probably come up
with a list the size of the Empire
State Building listing numerous
other examples!

6. However, being the curious cats
that we are, we still wanted to see
which ones were generally regarded
as the best home improvements and
took it on ourselves to ask some of
the best 45 interior design and real
estate experts in the business to see
what they thought.

7. And if that wasn’t enough, we also
wanted to see what prospective
home buyers regarded as the most
important improvement when
looking for a home to purchase and
decided to send out a questionnaire
to get to the bottom of this – to 113 of
them to be exact!

8. So before going through this
comprehensive review, make sure
you sit down somewhere
comfortable, pour yourself a nice
glass of wine, and have a look at the
results that we have summarized
below in the infographic.

9. Most Important
Improvement
According to
Prospective Home
Buyers

10. To be completely honest, the results of the
questionnaire surprised us a little bit.
According to prospective home buyers,
having an open plan is the most important
home improvement. You always hear
about updated kitchens and bathrooms,
which granted do make up the 2nd and
3rd positions, but we didn’t expect open
plan living to rank higher than these.

11. Unfortunately, if your house
currently doesn’t have an open plan,
creating one is likely going to be one
of the more expensive home
improvements you’ll be making as
well. You’ll likely spend more on it
than what you’ll end up getting back
for it.

12. According to Home Advisor, the
average cost of an improvement of
this nature will set you back
anywhere in the region of $41,563,
which could go up or down
depending on the amount of
structural work that you need to do
to complete it.

13. According to our prospective home
buyer survey, those that ranked it as
their most important improvement
would pay a premium of 15.3% for it,
which would translate into an
absolute premium of $32,067
assuming the median home price of
$209,700.

14. This means that you would
theoretically stand lose $9,496 by
converting to open plan living! It
goes without saying that you’d have
to look at your particular house,
costs, and local preferences before
drawing this conclusion but it does
teach us one important lesson:

15. Just because buyers like a
particular home improvement
doesn’t mean it’s a good investment
for you!

16. Which Home
Improvement
Provides the Best
Financial Return?

17. This is another one that surprised us.
According to the survey, upgrading your
flooring is the best improvement you can
make from a financial standpoint. Even
though it only ranked 4th in overall
importance to prospective buyers, those
that ranked it as the most important were
prepared to pay a whopping 16.8%
premium for it – translating into an
absolute premium of $35,268.

18. You’d just have to wait a little longer
to find the person that regards
upgraded flooring as the most
important improvement, as
compared to say, an open plan as we
spoke about earlier.

19. Given the relatively lower cost of
upgrading your flooring, estimated at an
average of $4,218 by Home Advisor, you
would stand to gain $31,050 by upgrading
your flooring! Again, these are all very
rough numbers and you would have to
assess your situation independently to see
if these numbers work in your area, but it
does teach us another important lesson:

20. Often it’s the small and more
affordable home improvements that
have the most positive impact on the
value of your home!

21. What About the
Improvements that
Enhance the Overall
Emotional Pull of a
Home?

22. There’s one big problem with using
a survey to find out what the best
home improvements are, and that is
the fact that humans are irrational
and emotional beings.

23. It’s all nice and dandy to answer
what premium you would be
prepared to pay for a particular
home improvement when asked in a
survey; but will that answer still be
the same when after months of
searching you have finally found
your dream home?

24. We all know the answer to this one,
as many of us have been there before
for better or for worse! The answer
in most cases is no.

25. We all know the answer to this one,
as many of us have been there before
for better or for worse! The answer
in most cases is no.

26. The reason is simple, once we form
an emotional connection with a
home it is difficult to look at it as a
purely rational transaction.

27. We start envisioning ourselves
living in the home, asking ourselves
how our children would feel,
whether their stroller would fit in
the hallway, mentioning how cozy
the place is, and potentially coming
to the conclusion that we have to
buy it because it just feels right.

28. The problem is that all of these
characteristics are subjective, and will
mean completely different things to
different people. While conducting the
survey, many of the experts asked me
whether my question was relating to
financial value or emotional value, and I
think this is what they meant. It’s hard to
put a price tag on emotional value, because
it is different for everyone.

29. What Did the
Experts Think?

30. Tallying up the answers from the experts,
the majority included improvements to
the kitchen and bathroom as part of their
top 3 improvements with a total of 24
selecting those.
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