Should I refurb my house before selling?
What many first time buyers do is to buy a house that needs a bit of renovation, then renovate ‘one room at a time’ until they have the house they want to live in. The hope is that this work will equate to additional value in the property.
There are two factors at work here: creating a place that you want to live, and increasing the value of that asset. Refurbishing ‘room by room’ is usually a very innefficient way to renovate a property. In addition what tends to happen is that life changes along the way and a configuration that may have worked one day, does not work the next.
What the really big question becomes though is that if you know you want to sell your house, then should you refurb to maximize value
The questions you need to ask are:
- Is this renovation a good investment? What are the returns in value? If I spend 10k, will I get 12k in value? That’s a 20% ROI?
- Who is the likely buyer? Will they want to do their own renovation? Will they want to change the building structurally?
- Does increasing the value decrease your potential market.
Lets take the last point. If you have a 3 bed house that’s worth 250k as it stands, and you have similar houses selling in your area for 250k, then you pretty much know there’s a market out there for houses at that price. If you then spend 40k to refurb and do up the place then try to sell the house for 300k, you may have out priced many of the people that would have bought your home in the first place.
We happily buy un-renovated houses. Its like buying a blank canvas. If you are interested to have us look at your house or to make you an offer, please get your valuation now.

