Is It Worth The Money To Remodel Your Home?

What home improvements will get you the most bang for your buck?

When you’re considering your remodeling budget, how can you know how much money will be worth investing? How do you know how much your return on your investment will be?

If you’d like to do it yourself, enjoy the home and list later 

I recommend beginning by searching online. Find home listings that are similar to your home in both size and location. Sort these homes from lowest to highest in price. Make sure they are of similar size, function, and utility. Then ask yourself:

• What does the highest price home have that the lowest priced homes do NOT have?
• Can you make your home like the highest priced homes?
• What would it take to make the house more like the highest priced homes.

And finally…

It’s important to be very honest at this point about what you can and can’t do. Will the remodels that worked in other homes work in yours? Can you afford to remodel? Do you have the time to remodel?

It’s also important to be honest about how comparable your home is to these other homes. Are they all similar situations (great walk scores, similar condition, etc.)?

When One Simple Remodel Paid Off Big

One of my clients in Ballard was getting ready to sell their condo, but it didn’t have a washer or dryer. I ran the numbers for condos WITH a washer and dryer vs. WITHOUT a washer and dryer… and condos WITH a washer and dryer were going for up to $40,000 more! So what did we do? We found a location in their condo that would work for installing a washer and dryer. We were able to hire a plumbed for $2,000 and found a washer and dryer used. By spending just a few thousand dollars, we were able to increase their potential sale price by $40,000

Another good example of this was our Meridian Tower listing. No one offered over $1 million dollars for that listing. I told my client that the primary issue is the finish level was too old and low for our market today. We spend $120K renovating, put the house on the market 3 months later and sold it for $1,510,000. Yes, spent $120K and make $290K for having done it.

If you just want us to take care of it directly before listing your home

The truth is this is something our team does on a regular bases. The easiest thing you can do is figure out what your budget for improvement looks like. Then call us over to help. We will find the best options given your budget and spend your money intelligently prior listing. You can find several blogs on our site called “making of a listing” All those blogs are about homes we changed or renovated for resale. ALL of them made our clients hefty returns.

—a huge win!