5 Top Tips For Enhancing The Value Of Your House

Why enhancing your property’s value can help with selling it

When you’re ready to sell your property, you want to make sure you achieve the best possible price. One way to increase the value of your home is to make enhancements. These can range from small-scale projects such as repainting a room through to larger-scale remodelling that can include replacing flooring and windows or renovating a bathroom or kitchen.
The right choice for your house or flat or other property will depend on a range of factors, including how much time you have before selling, your budget, and more.

Increasing the overall value of your house or flat can be an important way to potentially boost its sale price even when the property market faces uncertainty, which can happen, as Property Investor Today says.

When buyers assess whether to make an offer on your home – and that can include viewings where they come to tour the interior and exterior in person – they will review practically every aspects of the property, including its appearance, the condition it’s in and more.

A home that doesn’t look well maintained or has problems that have not been resolved will seem less valuable to many buyers, and cause them to reduce the price that they offer for it, or even to completely lose interest. That’s why taking time to consider the tips in this guide, as well as advice on how to best attract a buyer, can help with getting a competitive and swift offer.

Check out the guide below for five of the top tips we’ve heard for increasing your home’s value. You can also reach out to the team at LDN Properties to discuss a fast, hassle-free offer to buy your property without the need for any improvements or if you prefer you can read about our home buying process in our Knowledge Base.

Five top tips that might boost the value of your home

Not all of these tips will be suitable for your home – for example, if you live in a flat that is several floors above the ground, you likely won’t have a garden to redesign. But you should find that some of this advice could help with increasing the value that buyers perceive your property to have, which in turn might assist with speeding up getting a competitive offer for it.

Redesign your garden

If your property has a garden in the front, at the rear, or both then you could make low-cost garden improvements to help with increasing the property’s value. Ways to improve garden can be as simple as weeding and repairing the lawn through to installing fences, trees, or even creating a dedicated area for eating and sitting outside. A well-maintained garden offers a great first impression to buyers and can also make a property feel larger. Because space is considered a premium, this can be one of the best tips to follow.

Renovate or update a kitchen or bathroom

Consider investing in a renovation or complete update of your kitchen or bathroom. Perhaps it’s been a very long time since you grouted the bathroom tiles or made improvements to the kitchen like rethinking the layout. Whether you make minor cosmetic changes to enhance the look of these rooms, or whether you invest heavily in a complete redesign, they are fixes that will help boost your home’s value. The kitchen and the bathroom are two of the most heavily used rooms in properties, and so buyers are scrutinising these spaces in homes to make sure they’re of an attractive standard.

Divide space to create an extra bedroom

Having an extra bedroom can increase your property’s value, and it doesn’t have to require a huge investment to create this additional space. Look at ways that you might be able to divide up existing space within your house to create an additional bedroom. Steps could include converting an attic to a bedroom or adding walls to an existing floor plan for a new room. Depending on the scope of the project, this can be a higher-cost tip to follow, so you should only go this route if such work is within your total budget for improvements.

Give your property a low-cost makeover

When you want to improve your property’s value but are working with a limited budget, a solution is to give it a low-cost makeover. This can include simple but effective changes such as giving the interior of the home a fresh coat of paint, fixing annoying and noticeable problems like leaking taps, repairing damaged flooring, replacing dead lightbulbs, and more. While these efforts won’t make massive overall changes to the appearance of your property, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at just how much they can help to increase perceived value.

Replace windows and doors

One important aspect of a property that buyers pay close attention to are the doors and windows throughout, both inside and outside. As a key first step it’s imperative to ensure that your front door is freshly painted or otherwise looks as close to brand new as possible. The same goes for the windows and window frames; if they look old and worn or potentially with chipped paint, it’s going to make your property look less attractive. For a moderate cost outlay, you can replace doors and windows with the likely benefit of hiking your property’s value.

How can I add value to my home if it has significant problems to fix?

Whilst the tips in this guide can help with increasing the value at many types of properties, you might be wondering what to do if there are large-scale problems that need fixing at your home.

These issues can include structural flaws that have caused significant damage to the property’s structure like subsidence, legal complications that might include disputes with difficult neighbours, financial complications such as expensive council tax arrears, and many other scenarios.

Many of these factors can make some buyers view your house or flat as a “problem” property they have no interest in owning. Or they might dramatically lower the amount of money that they offer for the home, based on how much they think it could cost them to resolve the issue as the next owner. Either way, neither of these are beneficial outcomes to the person selling.

You should carefull review whether your home selling budget and schedule would allow for launching what might be a lengthy and costly process of trying to resolve the issues before seeking a buyer. Fixing a problem removes it as an issue of concern for buyers and will eliminate the scenario where they view your home as less valuable because of it.

Or you could try selling your home “as is” without fixing the issues that it has, and there are still ways to get a fair and fast sale by doing so. One solution is getting in touch with a quick buyer such as LDN Properties that has plenty of experience with buying all types of homes, even those considered by others to be problem properties. You’ll get a commission-free sale at a rapid and competitive offer, and the entire timeline should only be a handful of weeks.

In the next section of this guide you can learn more about the process of selling to a quick buyer, as well as the pros and cons of your other choices for how to sell your home.

Choosing which strategy to use for selling your property

Whether or not you take any steps to improve the overall value of your home, you’ll eventually have to make a selection of how you’ll try to find a buyer. You can often opt from selling to a quick buyer, selling with an estate agent, selling at an auction, or selling without any help.

Take time to review the specifics of all four methods below because you will discover that they have many variations in terms of how long they take, whether they will mandate that you pay commission, and more. By way of example, quick buyers and selling on your own are two ways to avoid fees, but estate agents and auctioneers will require that you pay them commission.

One useful step to take is to write down your priorities with the sale of your home, including your preferred sale price, if you can accept paying commission, and how fast you want to sell. Then you should compare these elements against the details of the various selling strategies, as this should assist with highlighting the most suitable approach for your unique situation.

Selling to a quick buyer

A quick buyer is a company such as LDN Properties that has the financial ability to purchase all types of leasehold and freehold homes immediately. They don’t need to wait weeks or months to first get approved for a mortgage to cover the cost of the transaction, which helps to reduce the typical schedule when selling this way down to a few weeks from the start to the end.

Honest quick home buyers will also promise to never charge a seller any commission, and that benefit sellers by reducing their overall expenses. It compares well to selling through an estate agent or an auctioneer, as those are two methods that charge fees and this commission is deducted from the final sale proceeds, which will add to your total selling costs.

Selling to a quick buyer is also a good move if your property has some type of problem that you cannot fix before trying to sell, as these companies are known for making competitive and speedy offers on properties regardless of their age, condition, location, shape, size, type, or any complications such as having council tax arrears or dealing with an ongoing legal fight.

Selling with an estate agent

When you sell a home with an estate agent, they’ll do most of the work, starting with putting together a listing that describes the property’s main features and includes photographs of the inside and outside. They’ll advertise this listing online, in local newspapers and in their office, arrange viewings, hear offers from buyers and try to get one through to exchanging contracts.

In exchange for handling the important steps needed to secure a buyer, you will pay the estate agent commission on the sale. Many estate agents set their commission at a rate from 1.15 percent to 1.40 percent of a home’s final sale price, although Compare My Move explains that the exact amount might be lower or higher than this. Before making any decisions be sure to always ask individual estate agents to tell you their fee, and shop around to find cheaper rates.

Homeowners that want a speedy sale might want to look at other choices for finding a buyer, as it can take several months or even more than an entire year to sell through an estate agent. Faster options for selling include contacting a quick home buyer, as it should only be a handful of weeks before you are able to exchange contracts and receive the full sale proceeds.

Selling via an estate agent also includes the risk that a buyer makes a genuine offer but then later cancels it, which they are allowed to do without having to pay any penalty, so long as contracts are not yet exchanged. You will then need to begin again with the search for another buyer, which might extend the selling schedule by many more months or even longer.

Selling at an auction

Auctioning a house or flat is another strategy that doesn’t require much effort from the seller, as the auctioneer will be responsible for creating a listing, promoting it, hosting the auction on a set day and time, and then overseeing the completion of the last stages of a successful sale.

Expect to pay commission with this selling choice, usually at about 2.5 percent of the final price that you home gets at the auction. This fee will be taken out of the auction proceeds right away, which will cause your expenses to rise. You might be able to negotiate with the auctioneer to reduce the fee that they charge you, or to have the winning bidder pay a portion of your costs, as this can help with reducing expenses – but auctioneers do not have to agree to this.

In addition to the potential high cost of selling your home this way, you will also have to wait a long time before any sale is finalised. There will be a waiting period of several weeks or longer between when you decide to sell at an auction and when the auction is held, and then if your home does manage to sell, the buyer often has about 28 days to finish the necessary tasks needed to formalise the sale, such as signing the required legal documents.

There are some auctioneers that might be willing to reduce how much time they give the winning bidder for handling these tasks, so it’s worth asking about this because it may help with speeding up the sale. But just note that other auctioneers may give buyers even more than 28 days, which would inevitably mean an even slower overall selling timeline.

Selling without any help

The final option to sell your property is on your own, which means you will need to take care of all the steps needed to find a buyer. You’ll have to put together a listing, advertise it, schedule viewings, hear offers and attempt to guide one to the eventual exchange of contracts.

Expect this process to be very time-consuming and stressful, so you might only want to think about pursuing it if you have prior success with selling a house or flat, or if you have an equally qualified friend or family member that will assist you with the sale without any charge. Even with such experience, it might take a number of months or more than a year to get an offer.

Note also that a buyer can make an offer but then withdraw it, which would cause the sale to fall apart. You would then need to start again with seeking a buyer, delaying a sale much longer. And there’s nothing you can do to penalise the person unless contracts have been exchanged.

The only clear advantage of selling without any help is that you avoid having to pay commission on a sale done through an estate agent or an auctioneer. Yet any saving that you make as a result could still be cancelled out by the funds that you spend throughout the selling process.