
29 Design Features That Increase Your Home’s Value - uptown
https://www.realestate.com/articles/finance/design-features-that-increase-home-value
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pascalxus
They forgot the biggest one: #30 Be located in a location where it's illegal
to add more housing supply.

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test6554
No, you can not just add solar panels to a house and make it worth 40% more.
Literally every home would have solar panels on it if that were even remotely
true. The truth is that you are unlikely to make your money back on most home
improvement projects, especially if you hire a contractor.

Also there is an upper limit on how much you can increase the value of your
home because you are limited by the value of your neighbor's homes and nearby
comparable homes. If you spend more on improvements than that upper limit, you
are almost guaranteed to lose money.

Also most first time home buyers lose money anyway because they fail to
properly assess the value of a property, they negotiate poorly, and they get
emotional about it.

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kkwteh
Having the phrase "solar panel" in a property description may correlate with a
40% increase in "expected sale price" (the blog post doesn't say what they
mean by this), but having solar panels in your home correlates with all sorts
of things that haven't been controlled for in the analysis (for instance how
warm the local climate is).

Much more useful would be an estimate of how much a home's value would
increase if solar panels were installed. That figure is certainly much less
than 40%.

Reference: I built Opendoor's home valuation model.

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saturdaysaint
This reads like a list of savvy remodels added to flipped homes in
outrageously expensive areas. It's easy to imagine someone adding a solar
roof, a fancy ceiling and a pergola to sell a 1,200 square foot bungalow in SV
for way more than it's worth. But most of these would be almost impossible to
add to any true starter home in the midwest, which probably average around
1,600 square feet - where do you add the mud room and home theater?

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SketchySeaBeast
This is clearly for specific areas of the world. In Canada "gas furnace" is
really the only option, and solar panels aren't terribly feasible.

That being said, I recently bought a home that checks a lot of those boxes
(gas furnace, clawfoot tub, hardwood floor, central vac, mid-century) and it
was on the market less than 24 hours with multiple offers, so clearly the
items are valued. I just question the ability to add those percentages to it.

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ericsilver
The author didn't do a very good job interpreting these statistics. The
conditions that would exist when someone would choose to invest in solar
panels exclude a large fraction of homes; solar panels are a recent enough
addition for most that homes which have been allowed to fall into disrepair
are excluded. They further exclude homes that don't have a view, homes that
are part of a multi-unit bloc, and, in some cases, duplexes.

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typetypetype
This is pretty meaningless without real dollar amounts.

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jessaustin
The percentages seem more informative to me, since they are meaningful across
different locations. If you don't know what 40% of a home price is in your
area, do some research.

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typetypetype
I believe that they are not meaningful across locations. Things like solar
arrays and bathtubs have a similar cost around the country, but house prices
can vary wildly.

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jessaustin
This is plausible, but would imply that improvements like these would be more
common in lower-house-cost areas, since they'd make a "bigger" difference.
That doesn't seem to be the case.

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cryptozeus
Actual headline article is "29 Design Features That Helped Starter Homes Sell
For More Than Expected" and it has home theater in the list.

Which starter home buyer is looking for home theater ? I live in bay area so
may be I don't get it :) . For starter home, only requirement here is to be
within 1.5 million dollar :D

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urda
A starter home is not "1.5 million dollar [sic]".

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d1zzy
I could be wrong but last time I checked you'd struggle to get a starter home
for <1.5 mil in Cupertino CA :)

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urda
Which you can easily argue is not the place right now to be picking your
Starter Home.

The point still stands.

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jwkjng
Solar Panels is #1. What I've heard about that is there's no return on
investment. What'd be a nice add-on to the article is the ROI figures for each
feature.

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projectwong
Yah I think it varies from region to region too. I don't think a mudroom in
souther California helps much. Would be great to see some research around
this.

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cryptozeus
Real estate article is trending on hacker news :) #bayarea

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shaqdonalds
Very Interesting...I wonder how much subway tiles would add to value? I always
thought those were winners.

Sure does look like Quartz is beating Granite at this time.

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codingdave
In short, be trendy. The items that increase your value today could very well
decrease it 5 years from now.

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saturdaysaint
Sure, but chances are that many of your house's existing features are becoming
progressively less trendy over time, and you could have something hard to sell
(or daunting to update) if you don't do too much over a few decades of home
ownership.

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fenwick67
> chances are that many of your house's existing features are becoming
> progressively less trendy over time

Depends on the time window really.

Hardwood floors were considered dated and carpet luxurious for a while

