If you are into real estate (selling or renting), the value of your property plays a huge role in all your calculations: from equity to rent prices you can charge or how much your home can sell, if you decide to sell.
There are some expensive ways to increase the value of your property, but there are also few tricks that don’t cost a fortune, but will give you some excellent results.
How to increase the value of your real estate property
Make the house stand out from the outside as well
This means having a perfectly clean and maintained lawn, beautiful landscaping work done and a nicely painted house.
The outside of your house is what people see BEFORE they bother come inside to check it out. If it looks like a dump, you are losing potential buyers before you can say ‘let’s clean it’.
You don’t have to pay a fortune to a landscaping company, but you can surely prune the hedges, clean up the mess in your yard and make sure it looks taken care of.
And, if the walls look like they need attention, you’d be shocked to see how much you can beautify your house with the price of few paint cans and 2-3 days of your time, if you don’t wan to pay a professional.
Upgrade the kitchen and the bathroom
These areas can make or break a great deal. Again, you don’t have to spend all your savings on huge jobs, but even little changes can go a long way.
Repaint the kitcken cabinets, if they need some more care, regrout the bathroom tile, maybe buy new fixtures.
Take a good look at your property (as if you were a stranger looking to buy) and see where the main ‘pain’ areas are and calculate how much money you’d need to invest in making your property look better.
If you need to invest tens of thousands of dollars and get just a smaller raise in the price you can ask, it’s not worth the hassle, let the new owner deal with these issues, but, if you can invest little money and few days of work, maybe it’s worth the extra effort.
So look into what can be done to dramatically increase property value and not drive you bankrupt. Painting the cabinets is cheaper than buying new ones, but still making the house look more valuable than before.
Remove / repair / clean the things that will draw unwanted attention
If a step is broken in the stairs, fix it. If there’s a crack in the wall, make sure it’s gone by the time you’ll get people to your open house. If the carpet is dirty, hire a professional cleaning company or replace it with a brand new one.
If there’s a nasty smell in the house, properly clean and make sure it’s gone.
Anything that makes people ask the ‘what’s this question‘ can keep your buyers from offering a good price.
Clean the house
And I mean properly clean the house.
We did some house hunting ourselves these days in NYC, to get a place to rent for our 2 families, and it’s shocking to me to see how dirty some of the houses are. OK, you expect us to pay up to 3 grand a month, but cannot be bothered to mop the floors and really dust the shelves?
Anything that’s dirty or smelly will disgust your potential buyers and chances are you’ll get a worse deal than you could get with proper cleaning.
These are few simple changes you can make to your real estate property to get a better selling price.
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