Great Real Estate Remodeling Strategies to Get Your Home Market Ready

Are you trying to decide whether to sell your home now or wait until 2020 or even 2021 to do it?

Most experts would tell you to sell it now. Interest rates are still on the relatively low side, and there are a lot of buyers in the market for a new home at the moment. You can take advantage of this by listing your home as quickly as you can.

But before you do, there are some important real estate remodeling steps that you should consider taking. There obviously isn’t a ton of time left between now and the end of 2019, which means you’ll have to hurry to get them done. But they can offer a great return on investment.

Take a look at several real estate remodeling strategies you can use to get top dollar for your home when you sell it.

Start by Sprucing Up Your Home’s Curb Appeal

According to a survey conducted by the National Association of Realtors, about 99% of real estate agents say that curb appeal is one of the most important factors when it comes to attracting potential buyers to your home.

The next time you pull up to your home, take a look at the outside of it from the curb and come up with some words to describe it. If words like “wow” and “incredible” don’t come to mind, it means that your curb appeal is lacking.

Fortunately, there are dozens of things you can do to fix your curb appeal and bring it back to life. You can:

• Paint your house a new color
• Replace your ugly roof
• Create a new landscape design
• Install a new front door
• Powerwash your driveway and walkways

You’re going to attract more attention to your home once it hits the open market when it has great curb appeal. Don’t underestimate the power of beefing your curb appeal up.

Consider Remodeling Your Kitchen

Remodeling a kitchen usually isn’t cheap. It costs homeowners about $23,000 on average to do it.

But a kitchen remodel is one of the best investments you can make when you’re considering the different real estate remodeling strategies. Depending on which real estate market your home is located in, you might be able to get a return on investment of up over 100%.

The kitchen has turned into the centerpiece of most homes. It’s the place where people gather to cook, eat, talk, and more.

It’s also one of the first rooms buyers are going to want to see when they walk through your home. Make sure that your kitchen looks stunning when they set foot in it by coming up with great remodeling ideas and carrying them out.

Bring Your Bathrooms Up to Date by Renovating Them

Do some or even all of the bathrooms in your home look like they’re still stuck in the 1990s? This is going to turn a lot of homebuyers off when they’re making their way through your home and seeing what it has to offer.

If you can afford to do it, it’s not a bad idea to renovate as many of the bathrooms in your home as you can before selling your house. But if that’s not an option, you should try to update your main bathroom at the very least.

Much like remodeling a kitchen, renovating bathrooms will provide you with a great return on investment in most cases. You’ll be able to recoup a portion of the money you spend on them when you sell your home as long as you improve them during the renovation process by making smart design choices.

Put Down New Flooring in Your Main Living Areas

Has the flooring in your home seen better days? Whether you have old carpeting running throughout your house or cheap laminate flooring, buyers are going to complain about your floors if they don’t look great.

It might not be realistic to replace all of the flooring that’s in your home right now. You can leave the carpet that you have installed in your spare bedroom alone.

But if you can swing it, try to swap out flooring that you have in your main living areas right now with new flooring that will look amazing. You’ll be surprised to see what a difference new floors can make in your home, even if they’re the only things you put in before selling it.

Figure Out How to Add to the Square Footage of Your Home

When you list your home for sale, you’ll need to include the square footage of it along with your listing.

A lot of homebuyers will look at the square footage before they look at anything else that has to do with your home. If the square footage is too low, they’ll move on and look at other homes with more space inside of them.

Putting an addition onto your home when you’re getting ready to sell it probably isn’t practical. But you might be able to increase the square footage of your home in other ways.

For instance, you can convert your garage into an extra bedroom or finish off your basement and add a bathroom to it. These things will add to your existing square footage and make people more interested in coming to see your home.

Build a Deck Behind Your Home or Revamp Your Old One

Potential homebuyers are going to spend most of their time wandering through the inside of your home when they’re thinking about buying it. But at some point, they’ll also step outside to see what the exterior of your home has to offer.

What are they going to find?

If you don’t have a nice place for them to hang out, that might be a problem. It’s why you should consider building a deck behind your home to create a clearly-defined outdoor entertaining space.

And if you do have a deck, you should consider doing whatever it takes to make it look its absolute best. By refinishing your deck and staining it, you can make it look like new in a matter of just a day or two.

Find Ways to Make Your Home More Energy Efficient

Energy efficiency isn’t something that people can see or feel when they’re exploring a home. As a result, those selling their homes don’t always think it’s worth giving their house’s energy efficiency a boost.

But many homebuyers specifically look for homes that are energy efficient nowadays. And they’ll love hearing that you’ve gone out of your way to make your home as energy efficient as it can be.

You can increase your home’s energy efficiency by:

• Installing brand-new exterior doors and windows
• Adding new insulation to your attic space
• Putting a smart thermostat into place
• Investing in new eco-friendly appliances
• Removing your old hot water heater and replacing it with a tankless option

You can even go as far as to replace all the incandescent lightbulbs in your home with LED ones. This is something that a homebuyer could do themselves if they really wanted to. But it’ll reinforce your commitment to energy efficiency in your home.

Finish by Adding a Fresh Coat of Paint to the Walls

Many of the real estate remodeling strategies that we’ve mentioned here will require you to spend money. Some of them will call for pretty sizable investments on your part.

But you don’t necessarily need to spend a small fortune to make your home look better to homebuyers. There are also some very simple tasks that you can do to improve your home without racking up a big bill in the process.

Putting a fresh coat of paint on all your walls is arguably the best thing you can do when selling your home. You might love the bright pink paint in your kitchen and the neon green paint in your child’s bedroom. But those paint colors will turn many buyers off.

Pick out some nice neutral paint colors and spend a weekend—or several weekends, depending on the size of your house—painting all your home’s walls. It’ll brighten up the space in no time and allow homebuyers to focus on the other aspects of your home as opposed to getting hung up on paint colors.

These Real Estate Remodeling Strategies Can Work Wonders for Your Home

Selling your home as-is is an option if you don’t want to do any remodeling to it. But you might not get anywhere near what you’re going to ask for it when you take this approach.

Instead, why not use one of these real estate remodeling strategies or some combination of them to improve the look and feel of your home?

It might cost you a little bit of money on the front end. But that money will come back to you when you close on your home when you make the right remodeling moves.

Check out our blog for more tips on pulling off a successful home remodeling job prior to selling your house.