building equity/adding value to a home, let's share thoughts and experiences!

[Weena]

I'd like to hear your experiences regarding adding value to your residential dwelling and building equity. I have a couple of ideas for a start at my place. The first one would be to build a proper driveway. We got a couple of quotes and one of them seems affordable so that might be our first step in improving the place. I also am thinking, down the road, to have a big equipped kitchen put into place.

How do you add value to your house? Is anyone willing to share their experience in making their place profitable in the long term?

[ssandra]

Originally Posted by Weena

How do you add value to your house? Is anyone willing to share their experience in making their place profitable in the long term?

I have no experience in this, but I've been thinking about this a lot, cause this will be my hobby once I have enough money to buy houses without loans

I believe that having quality materials is important of course. Besides that there is also the perceived value.

So, you can have a 100.000 dollar kitchen, but if it looks old, nobody will pay for it. You can also have a 10.000 dollar kitchen, looking amazing and people will pay more.

I personally like luxury so small details and things that look pretty are important for me. That doesn't mean it has to be expensive. The right color matching can already do a lot!

Small things like a roof over the drive way from where you get out of the car to the front door.

[SatvikBeri]

What I've heard is that generally you can expect improvements you make to add about 2/3 the cost to your home price. So spending to improve your home's resale value is generally a losing proposition.

That said, I have no idea where this statistic comes from, or how true it is.

[Weena]

I'm not sure globally but in Australia the cost of real estate has been steadily growing. Prices keep going up, and they have been for a few years. I LOOOOOVE my house but i know that nomads as we are we won't live here for life. So making a few smart changes will definitely add value if we have to sell one day (hopefully not too soon ).
Sandra, as you say the quality would be a very strong point to consider. When i visualise a kitchen it would have quality material. At the moment it's functional but we lack of bench space (the kitchen/dining itself is a large room, it'd be easy to make it into a splendid kitchen). When i think of benches i think granite (so definitely might wait a while to afford that) and stainless appliances.

So you want houses without loans? Wouldn't that be nice? I'd love that too (noooooot the case though).