Article - Most home renovations don't pay off

[Red Green]

For your Sunday reading...

[Ed Pawlowski]

That may be true, but who cares? I do renovations for my use and pleasure with no regard to recouping the money at sale time. Of course, I plan to live here until I die. If it works out that way, I'll never know for sure.

[JIMMIE]

Only true if you define value as what you get after resale the home. You put in a new kitchen mostly because you are tired of looking at the old kitchen, not to turn a big profit.

Jimmie

[aemeijers]

Dollar value at resale isn't the only criteria- it is being able to sell it at all. As it sits right now, maybe a single guy might buy my place, but a woman is gonna want to keep looking. (It sat empty for 6? months before I bought it, and Mrs. previous owner made her husband accept my low-ball offer.) And since the place has 3 bedrooms, the odds of a single guy buying it are pretty slim. So, at some point, I'm gonna have to throw enough money to at least make it presentable. Nothing fancy, just presentable.

[Steve B]

What do you know. All that writing, and they finally put the important stuff in the last paragraph.

Go figger.

Steve

Heart surgery pending? Read up and prepare. Learn how to care for a friend.

[Frank]

Yeah, true. Not much new here. In today's housing market, if your house is not in perfect repair or needs serious upgrades, it will be very difficult to sell and DYI stuff like painting will reap rewards.

[Robert Green]

I'm betting the legion of people watching all the HGTV shows about renovations and the alleged increase in value they provide are disappointed. You do raise an interesting question. I'll bet there are a lot more people planning to die in their current home then there* used to be. Show of hands?

-- Bobby G.

*Second worst bunch of words in the English language: "They're saying their chair isn't there." They're just as bad as the twos! Why have three "there/they're/their's", three "to/two/toos" and two "its/its" that you can't tell from one another without having to think about it?

[Jim Elbrecht]

Amen. I've been here 25years or so & haven't stopped making it the way *we* like it. I have never given a thought to resale value.

Jim

[Jim Elbrecht]

-snip-

That's my plan. Probably while completing one of the 20 or so projects I juggle. The kids are welcome to sell it, live in it, or burn it to the ground. I've gotten my money's worth.

Jim

[Colbyt]

Most of the regulars have already made very valid points. I will just add a cynical observation.

Who were these idiots kidding all along when they spent way more borrowed money than they had to do overpriced "improvements" in honor of the resale Goddess?

Make your home comfortable for yourself but I think you should always use a little common sense. A 50K kitchen remodel in a neighborhood of 50-60K homes is not using good common sense. It might be justifiable if you plan to live there until you die and love cooking but don't kid yourself it is money spent, not money invested. Do keep in mind I speaking of current value, not what you paid ages ago. I did a 12K kitchen remodel on my in-laws home many years ago (1987). We all laughed about it because they only paid 15K for the house in 1952 or 53. The new kitchen and appliance cost almost as much as the house.

They enjoyed it together for a few years and my FIL still enjoys it today.

If you spend money you have or will shortly have then do as you please. Borrowing the money can become a disaster.

Off the soapbox, throw money not rocks. :)

[krw]

Dunno, the second to the last was good, too, but I especially like the $226K master suite. The second idiot was the second one who bought it for $125K.

Indeed.

[krw]

SWMBO watches those shows all the time. I've not seen *one* where the alleged increase (I like that phrase) came in at 100% or more. Most do come from "I don't care what it's worth now - we did it for us" attitude.

Not me. We'll likely move at least once, again, and perhaps twice, in the next five or ten years. We moved here two years ago and I don't see retiring here. Maybe not far, but not here.

[Robert Green]

disappointed.

I've found the more people adapt their houses to their own personal tastes, the more reluctant they seem to leave it (looks in the mirror). I don't plan to die here, but life may have other plans. I have stayed longer than I wanted to because of so many things I've added and the wretched economy.

-- Bobby G.

[Robert Green]

>

Well, I have, as in mostly "This is going to hurt the resale value, but so f'ing what?" (-:

-- Bobby G.

[Robert Green]

>

What I am seeing in my neighborhood is that the real cheap fixer uppers are the ones that have broken the logjam of unsold homes. Investors and out of work carpenters teaming up in one case.

-- Bobby G.

[Steve B]

And I'd say that most people, now that flipping houses is passe, will not do a major renovation unless they intend to live a long time in the house. As they said, maybe a cheapo curb appeal project. Anything that bumps up the price today is bad in the real estate comparables. Houses of the same square footage can be had in the same neighborhood for less, and then the DIYer can do their own remodeling and save the labor costs if they DIY.

Steve

Heart surgery pending? Read up and prepare. Learn how to care for a friend.

[Steve B]

>

But, Jim, that goes against the article. ;-)

Steve

[Steve B]

> >

Our last kitchen remodel cost us $40k. Didn't add anything to the dropping resale value, but made it a better cash cow Las Vegas vacation rental. We had intended to retire there, then found Utah. Our current rancho remodeling will cost about $10k due to a LOT of tradeouts and cost cutting things where we splurged on the last one. We don't give a whit about resale. The remodel just totally opens up the inside of the house, adds to the view, and makes us like it more.

Steve

[bambam]

I don't understand how they come up with these numbers. They are, I suspect, guesses and based more on anecdotal evidence than anything else.

Let me use my own house as an example. We just renovated our kitchen, family room and three bathrooms. Cost was 50 thousand. I'm a builder .. retail would have been something like 70 thousand.

Howwould they figure how much value we added. The value of a house is what it sells for -- willing seller, willing buyer and all that -- not what a bank or an appraiser or an assessor or some self appointed Yahoo! writer might think it is worth.

Therefore I cannot say what the house would have sold for prior to the renos, and I cannot say what the house will sell for after the renos because it is not for sale.

Since money has a time value, how do they assign a value to how quickly a house would sell -- since it wasn't for sale before and isn't for sale after?

To me, this is just morecrap based on half assed research intended to sell magazines ... a friend used to own a bunch of newspapers; he always said content was important only to keep the ads separated. Same as HGTV's so-called content. And same as this nonsense.

Ken in Calgary

[Vic Smith]

Oddly enough, that's what I thought until yesterday. Mostly because of my wife's feelings. Then we got our RE tax bill.

38% increase. Cook county, Illinois. Things change. Even my wife's feelings. She is pissed. Me too, but I see a silver lining. And Florida skies.

--Vic