Houses are an important investment opportunity. By making sensible and valuable additions to your home you can boost your property value and enjoy some amazing features until you cash in when you sell your home. Here are five of the best investment opportunities for your home.
Expand Your Home With An Extension
For the ultimate addition to a home that brings value and functionality, look no further than a home extension. You can fully extend the upstairs and downstairs of your property to create more living space and extra bedrooms, the two highest value spaces in any home. Extensions can add a considerable amount to your house price, paying for themselves when the time comes to sell. If fact, you make a decent profit on the cost of a home extension if you do it right.
The first step is getting planning permission, which is not as simple as it used to be. Biodiversity Net Gain is now a part of UK legislation, and any addition to a home or a new build will need this and many other surveys completed so that work can begin. Arbtech makes these surveys quick and simple. Their team of experienced surveyors can complete all the surveys you need to get your planning permission approved and let you start your extension. Any time you save on a project like this saves you money too.
Give Your Garden A Makeover
For a low-cost way to add value to your home, and to get a whole new space for you and your family to enjoy, give your garden a makeover. Gardens are a highly desirable feature for any home to have, but most people leave them be and do not invest their time or a little of their money in them. This is a mistake. Simply by adding a flat lounging space like a wooden deck or stone patio you can create a destination in your garden. A garden that has had a lot of positive attention will likely drive up the price of the entire property. This is why many investors purchase real estate and make improvements, such as giving the garden a makeover, so that they can make profit.
You will have a place to go for a morning coffee, lunch in the sun, or to entertain friends in the evenings, but it doesn’t have to stop there. Al fresco dining has become very popular lately, but al fresco cooking takes things to a higher level. Bring more than a barbeque to the outdoors and consider adding some extra cooking space and perhaps a pizza oven. Now your garden is more like a room of your home than a pretty space outside of it.
Bathrooms Are The Best Rooms
The value of a bathroom is huge. Per square foot, nothing beats a bathroom for value. Though they are expensive to upgrade, the investment is worthwhile because it comes back to you in your house price. When the time comes to sell your home, your will recoup your investment and probably make a profit too. Well-appointed and freshly decorated bathrooms also help to sell a home to prospective buyers.
This is not just true of the main family bathroom either. Smaller downstairs bathrooms and en-suites also need to look their best to sell a home, and investing in these spaces can yield great returns. You also get to enjoy a brand-new bathroom space yourself. Remember to stay neutral in these spaces, though. Any strong colours or daring decorations may hurt your property value rather than help it, and you may not be able to find a buyer that shares your taste when the time comes. Stick to quality bathroom fixtures and fittings using neutral colours that everyone can appreciate.
Spend Money On Storage
There is never enough storage in a family home. Barely a day goes by without having to find space for something new. One of the smartest investments you can make in your home is to solve the storage problem with some custom storage solutions. This makes a home a more peaceful place, no longer littered with the debris of family life. Children’s toys, winter coats, and seemingly endless pairs of shoes all need somewhere to stay that is out of the way.
Take a long hard look at the storage spaces you already have in your home and think about how they could be arranged more efficiently. It is also worth taking a long hard look at your clutter. There are probably bits and bobs collecting dust on your shelves and mantlepieces that could be cleared to give you some more room. Be ruthless with what you already have. Do you really need it? Could you sell it? This will help reduce the amount of storage space you need.
Home Energy Generation And Storage
You may not be planning on selling your home and cashing in for a long time, so it is worth thinking about the kinds of homes you will be competing with. The future homes will have many energy-saving and generating features that homes today rarely have. Solar panels on the roof are an obvious candidate. You see them sparingly on houses today, but what about ten, fifteen, or twenty years from now?
For a sensible investment in your home that comes with a lot of benefits, it is hard to find a better choice than home solar paired with battery storage. Though it does require a large financial investment, it will help to pay for itself with every electricity bill that comes through the letterbox. The energy that solar panels generate can be stored in the home battery until you need to use it later, and excess electricity can be sold to the national grid. In the near future, most homes will have solar panels on the roof, not just a few. Get them installed early before demand pushes the price up.
These five home additions all help push up your property value and give you and your family a new feature to enjoy. You do not have to do all of them, but if you pick two or three you like the sound, you will be very happy with the extra equity they put into your home.