When It Comes to Your Home—Should You Improve Or Move?

Homes

It’s a constant and nagging question that many home owners simply can’t get off their minds: whether to move or to improve? The answer is never all that easy to come by, and is determined by a wide variety of factors, including everything from how good/bad the condition of the home actually is, how much money a person could allocate to improving the home, whether the sale price would imply a profit or loss for the home owner as compared to what they paid for it, and a few other factors besides. However, these days the failing housing market has jumped into the mix and has made it a whole lot wiser for home owners to improve rather than to move. It’s a simple equation really: depreciating property values and a growing scarcity of buyers (i.e., a buyer’s market) mean that selling now would almost inevitably entail a financial loss for the seller and would surely be a very complicated ordeal. All in all, it’s much more intelligent to hunker down with what you’ve got at present, spruce it up as much as possible to boost the value as much as possible, and wait for a more preferable moment to sell if that is ultimately your goal.

With a little research, most home owners will discover that they things that they dislike about their home or which are affecting its value can be resolved without too putting too much money down. If executed properly, such renovation projects can raise the property value by double or triple the total cost of the project itself, which is a tradeoff that no savvy home owner would want to pass up. The key is focusing in on the kinds of home improvement projects that will have the most effect on your property value whilst still not costing you too much out-of-pocket.

Such projects can either be cosmetic or they can be structural/functional; in either case, they need to be executed with due diligence. As far as the cosmetic projects are concerned, any realtor or housing market analyst will be able to confirm to you that the front of a home—the most visible part of the exterior to the public—is the most rewarding area to tackle. Any project that can help boost your home’s so-called “curb appeal” is going to work wonders on your property value, and if you can get such a project in from start to finish on a tight budget then all the better! The options here are many, though if you attempt several you will want to coordinate well and make sure that choices of materials and styles/colors combine stylishly. From new window units to a more elegant choice of siding materials to a classy landscaping makeover, the idea here is to be creative without dipping into the savings account too much.

Finally, as regards the structural/functional projects, you will want to tackle the problem areas of your home: is there humidity building up in a certain room such as the basement? Then a treatment of tanking slurry is needed. Is there an area of the home where space is not being used intelligently? Then new storage and functional redesign should be thought about. These projects may not be as noticeable from the outside, but can also do a fair bit of good for your property value and therefore are not to be overlooked.