Homeowners Jazz Up Homes for Style Not Equity
Posted:
Friday, June 15th, 2012
Category:
Real Estate License
Surprise, surprise! You would think that in these times of slow inventory turnover and low mortgage rates homeowners would readily favor spending on home improvement to burnish home value rather than to buff form and boost function. Contrary to intuition, according to a new survey, homeowners would rather pump up style rather than equity.
It’s not quite the signal that professional real estate agents with, say, a renewed SC real estate license , would want to hear from a reawakening real estate market, but it certainly does say that confidence is coming back to the homeowners and that they might be priming to sell in the near future.
“We expected that in this economy Americans’ highest priority would be increasing home value, but instead we found people are focused on pleasing themselves, not the next owner,” noted Liza Hausman, vice president of marketing for Houzz, a leading online platform for home remodeling.
The new study, which polled 29,127 homeowners and renters planning to build, remodel or decorate in the next two years, discovered that a whopping 86 percent of the respondents believe that it’s more important to furbish their home to “improve the look and feel of the space,” while only 47 percent said it’s more important to improve their home to enhance its value.
“Remodeling used to be about increasing resale value—making improvements that are appealing to the majority of buyers in order to boost the value of the home,” noted Dean Herriges, the national president of the National Association of the Remodeling Industry (NARI). “More and more people are throwing out the resale theory and making specialized improvements that suit their needs and their needs only.”
