For some home additions the answer is unfortunately yes. Certain home additions can make your home harder to sell and lower its resale value. But, home additions that are designed and built well, normally improve your home’s value. Why? Because not all home additions are created equal.
This home addition was designed for the homeowner and with a future home buyer in mind increasing the home’s future resale value.
Whether you’re doing a single room addition or a multi-room, multi-story addition, the way the project is designed, documented, and built will affect your enjoyment of the addition and your home’s resale value. That’s why it’s so important to work with an experienced and reputable home addition contractor. A contractor who will get things right for you, right from the start.
Let’s take a look at what getting a home addition right means.
- Design your home addition for your needs and with resale in mind. When you have your new addition designed, you want to make sure the layout and features meet your needs now and for the foreseeable future. While this should be your first priority unless you have a true need to design something so unusual that it will be a turn-off to a prospective buyer in the future, it’s a good idea to consider what home buyers will like and want when you sell your home. As a home addition contractor, we’ve often advised clients that the way they want an addition to look and function may be so unique to their family or tastes that it may become an issue when they want to sell the home.It’s usually best for resale and, usually, for day-to-living in the home, if an addition is smoothly integrated with the look and flow of the home’s other spaces. While home additions generally add value to your home at resale some can lower the value and resale appeal.
- Getting permits and building to code. Even if you’re just adding on one room, it is critical for your contractor to make sure the plans meet all the relevant building codes, zoning, and if your home is part of a homeowners association, it meets their guidelines and approval as well.It is also important that your contractor, not you, pull the appropriate building permits. If the zoning in a neighborhood does not permit certain things – like adding a full second kitchen to the property or keeping a multi-story addition to a certain height, you want your contractor to abide by the zoning and build to code. If you don’t do this, you can run into problems with resale. Plus, you could even find yourself having to tear down your brand new addition if neighbors complain or county inspectors find your home addition contractor failed to pull the right permits or keep to code.
- Pay attention to the craftsmanship and quality of construction. You want to work with a home addition contractor who pays attention to the big things but also the construction details. A few years from now, you don’t want to be looking at a cracked foundation or cracks in the interior walls that signal unstable construction. You want the home addition to be well-planned and well-constructed so you’re not dealing with constant repairs – or a home inspection that finds deal-breaker problems with the addition.
- Integrate the addition’s external appearance with your existing home for optimum curb appeal. It’s very important that your addition looks like the rest of your house from the outside. It will definitely affect resale if you overpower a one-level home by adding an out-of-scale multi-story addition to one side. We also see homes that sit and sit on the market because someone has simply “stuck” a small, plain one-room addition onto an existing home without making any effort to integrate the rooflines, design elements, or to exterior materials that don’t match or even relate to the existing home’s exterior.
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