What should you renovate when thinking of selling your home

If you are planning to sell, or you moved into a new home, the most common question we hear from homeowners is: ‘Where do we invest our money to get the best return?’. When listing your house for sale, it is always a great idea to invest a little in renovation and staging in order to make your house more appealing to buyers. Unfortunately, we often find that when homeowners purchase a new home with the intentions of doing some renovations, they tend to hold themselves back on designing a space that really represents them. The design can suffer because the homeowner becomes fixated on what should go in there solely based on the resale value later on, as opposed to making their house a home.

Which leaves us with the question: what is really valued by a potential home buyer?

We have reached out to our friend Barbara De Angelis, a sales representative of Main Street Reality Ltd., to provide a Real Estates perspective on what is actually valued in the eyes of a home buyer. Barbara goes into detail on how COVID-19 has changed the way homes are selling, and provides insight on where your renovation investments should be allocated based on buyers’ demands.

The world of selling and buying a home in the age of COVID 19 by Barbara De Angelis

The new world of selling and buying a home in the age of COVID-19 is now conducted almost totally in ‘Virtuality’ for the health and safety of all involved. Technology, more than ever before, allows agents to upload 360° photos from a smartphone, or 360° camera to create professional quality, 360-degree virtual tours, 3D models and floor plans complete with measurements and photos. Agents now have the ability to host virtual walk-throughs using embedded live video chat with consumers on any device, in real time. Homebuyers can navigate their way through the home, exploring different areas at their own pace.  It’s virtually like being there in person, without the health risk.  Zoom meetings with clients have largely, but not entirely, replaced face-to-face meetings; and paperwork is now completed entirely through electronic document signing and online payments. Upon closing, keys can be sheltered in a lockbox, and the code is supplied to the buyer once they have transferred the money to the lawyers.

But while the home buying and selling methods have become virtual, the basics of ‘getting the biggest bang for your buck’ from the largest personal investment of your life hasn’t changed too much since COVID-19. 

One of the biggest driving factors in a home buyer’s purchasing decision has to do with TIME, (and if you’re a working parent at home with your school-aged kids, you’ll know especially what that means!) Even long before COVID, Time was a major factor in purchasing decisions – work lives and the stresses do not allow much time for renovating, fixing, painting and even cleaning, so buyers want as much of a finished product and the most efficient uses of smaller spaces as their money can buy. 

It’s Not The Age, It’s The Stage(Ing):  Again, a majority of buyers have neither the time, nor additional immediate funds to be fixer-uppers.  Fixer-uppers are best left to professionals. That’s why a well-designed and properly renovated ‘packaged’ house sells so much faster, and for significantly more money than one with things left undone, unfixed, or outdated and cluttered with the seller’s stuff. 

Based on my experience, as well as most real estate agents’ experiences with clients, here are some of the top trends since 2016 * where a seller could obtain the biggest bang for their renovation budget when preparing their house to sell, (yes, even now during COVID-19, although keep in mind that designers and trades will have scheduling/working and safety protocols securely in place too): 

• Kitchen and dining room to be completely, or partially open. Top finishes include stainless steel or built-in appliances;
• Granite or natural stone kitchen countertops;
• White upon white, or white upon light grey:  white kitchen and bathroom cabinetry and countertops.  Our experiences with clients’ desires for white are supported by Nino Sitchinava, principal economist at Houzz, who showed similar findings from consumer research for kitchens and master bathrooms;
• Dual or triple purpose rooms for home-office,
• laundry/mudrooms/work rooms with lots of storage cabinetry;
• Energy-saving features such as Energy Star appliances and windows;
• More home-storage, such as garage storage and walk-in pantries;
• Hardwood flooring, and/or porcelain flooring made to look like hardwood flooring in high-traffic areas;
• Outdoor living spaces, patios and beautiful exterior lighting.

Buyers’ tastes might vary by region, so it’s smart to know your area and demographics.  And don’t “over-improve” for your area; look closely at the cost versus resale value of renovating for your area.  You don’t want to be installing marble and granite walls and counters in an area where you won’t be able to recoup 30% or less of those costs!  A similar look can be achieved using less expensive materials, if that’s what your area likes. The cost of doing nothing, however, can be far greater than the small loss you might incur on any home-improvement projects. It is more expensive to get stuck in time with your home if it lingers on the market. You’ll likely have to pay your ongoing mortgage, maintenance, and longer-than-normal staging costs; and the longer your home lingers, the more likely your home is perceived as becoming ‘stale’, and buyers may try and ‘low-ball’ you. 

While many sellers may not be able to do a complete whole-home reno, the time-tested rooms that provide the biggest return on investment remain – the kitchen and bathrooms. Of course, if nothing can be reno’d, less is always more, so purge progressively; put on a fresh coat of neutral paint; and now more than ever before – clean, clean, clean!

We are going through an unprecedented paradigm shift; our behaviours at home, at work and at leisure, have changed dramatically, augmented by the adoption of technologies across many areas of our lives. This shift is creating both disruption and opportunity, much of which is obvious in the world of design and real estate.

Additional Sources: *National Association of Home Builders, February 2019 Survey of  4,000 home buyers — those who have either recently purchased a home or plan to purchase a home within the next three years — ranking 175 features based on how essential they are to a home-purchasing decision.

We want to thank Barbara for taking the time to share her real-estate perspective on this topic. If anyone is interested in more real estate advice, you can visit her website.

We do want to leave you with one thought. If you plan on staying in your home for awhile, then don’t worry about the trends or expectations of the future buyer. At the end of the day that changes, do what makes you happy and what will make you love your home. It is the one place that gives us the most comfort. So don’t be afraid to put that crazy tile on the floor if you absolutely fell in love with it. When it comes time to sell, you likely have to do some updates anyway, because as Barbara mentioned with our busy lives, most home buyers do want to move into something that feels clean and doesn’t require a lot to renovate.