Love it or list it? It’s a problem faced by most people at some stage in their lives: your home no longer offers the space or types of room that you need anymore.
Your family might be expanding and you need an extra bedroom, or siblings sharing just isn’t working as well as it did a few years ago. You might need a home office, you now really want that big kitchen/diner that you’ve always dreamed of, or you want a garden suitable for your family’s needs. In some cases space or building potential is totally maxed-out, leaving no alternative but to move.
However, many properties offer the potential for an extension, whether it’s space in the loft, garage, side/back of the property or even a cellar suitable for conversion, the decision isn’t always an easy one to make. If you’re weighing up whether it’s better to put your property on the market and move, or to extend and improve your existing home, here are some key factors to consider:
Go big or go home- extending your current property
With house prices having risen in many areas to be out of the reach of many and with high stamp duty, house extensions are becoming more and more common as growing families seek more space.
If you love the location, have great neighbours and/or your children are settled at a good school close by, extending your home is a viable option. Extending it also brings the bonus of adding value to your property: by upgrading a two bedroom house to one with a third bedroom, it will increase the potential selling price in the future quite considerably.
When planning an extension, think about its practicality and also the appeal to future possible buyers. A three or four bedroom house that has a small downstairs space still will be harder to sell in the future. It’s also inadvisable to over improve. For example, you are unlikely to recoup the costs of upgrading a house by adding extra bedrooms or a huge kitchen extension if it’s located on a street of tony two bedroom properties- you have to think of ceiling prices.
Moving on?
If extending your present home isn’t an option, then selling up is the obvious solution. Unless you are intending to stay in a property for several years, you might not see the full financial benefits of an extension anyway. Moving house doesn’t necessarily mean leaving the area you love and could be well worth it in terms of the extra space you gain, as well as financially.
Bromley Property Company’s Digital Marketing Manager, Becky Freeman, sold her property with us a year ago:
“We lived locally in Coney Hall and loved the area, but we had had a third baby and needed at least another bedroom in our then-property. We were considering have a loft conversion done, but as it was a fairly small loft we would’ve lost a huge amount of storage space, and we didn’t have a suitable garage joined onto the house to use. In the end we found a bigger property, closer to the older children’s school, and decided to spend money on moving there instead. There’s still work we’d like to do in the future (the dream kitchen extension!), but we love the fact our new home has a bigger overall footprint already so it was worth the move”
If you’d like advice about whether to love it or list it, and on moving within your current area, or whether you want to know if doing any building work would increase the value of your property, Bromley Property Company can help.
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