UK Housing Market Stalls: How To Improve Your Home
Turning on the news or reading the papers, you’ll find one gloomy headline after another concerning the housing market. According to Nationwide, a leading UK building society, house prices have taken a real hit, with the current decline the steepest since 2009.
Whether you’re a homeowner looking to sell or someone looking to buy, it can all sound like bad news. The cost of a mortgage has gone up astronomically, which means less activity in the market. This, in turn, means that sellers are on the back foot. In fact, property website Zoopla has predicted 2023 could see the lowest number of house sales for a decade.
With those sobering facts in mind, if you’re planning on selling and need some ideas to improve your home to make a sale, then we’ve got just the thing for you this month at Doormatic Garage Doors. On the other hand, if you feel like moving isn’t an option right now, then let us help you make the most of what you’ve got for years to come!
How to make your home better
Making your home better – both in how it looks and how it functions – is the key to both feeling more content with your current property as well as making it more attractive to buyers. So let’s break this into two categories: simple things you can do to tidy up the appearance of your home and other work you can carry out to improve your enjoyment of your home.
Tidying your property
- Jet wash your driveway and your pathways
- Remove weeds from your garden and driveway
- Give your fence a lick of paint
- Clean your windows inside and out
- Fill in cracks and holes internally and externally
- Perform a deep clean on the kitchen and bathrooms
- Replace the front door to your home
Improving your enjoyment
- Add smart technology to control access, lighting and audio
- Replace your old, noisy garage door with something sleek and stylish
- Upgrade your windows to match your garage and front door
- Convert your loft into a new office room or playroom
- Extend the rear of your property to maximise your floor space
What changes add the most value to your home?
When making any changes to your property, if you’re keen to sell now or in the future, it’s important to weigh up how much you’ll have to spend against the amount you’re likely to recoup. Just because the investment is big, it doesn’t mean that it will result in an equally big payoff.
Loft conversions are a popular idea for adding value to a home, since more rooms usually equals a higher asking price. But consider whether, in your area, anyone would be willing to pay those higher prices for your property style. On average, you could increase the value of your home by around 15%, but if it wasn’t worth a lot to begin with, it might not gain you much more in the asking price when compared with the cost of the conversion work.
A brand new garage door, on the other hand, will cost a lot less than a loft conversion and could add around 5% to your asking price, making it a low-risk, high-reward strategy.
And if you don’t already have a garage, then building one as part of your property – provided you have the room – could be a valuable addition. Providing storage and off-street parking, this can be a very appealing feature in the right areas.
When will the housing market pick up?
A mixture of factors, from mortgage rates to the cost of living, have impacted the housing market in the UK. But when will the housing market pick up again? It’s always hard to predict, but some experts believe the latest house price fall will only go so far due to a lack of new, affordable housing, forcing fierce competition when it comes to bidding.
Without a massive increase in wages, it will require mortgage rates to come down in order for the market to start moving again. With more people approved for mortgages, the more demand there will be and the more likely we are to see house prices stabilise. For this reason, people and businesses are keeping a close eye on the Bank of England’s interest rates.
Here at Doormatic, we have everything you need to improve both the look and functionality of your home. From beautiful, modern front doors to stylish sectional garage doors, you can either invest for your own benefit or to attract a higher asking price. Plus, with automatic garage doors also available, you can open and close your door via your smartphone to create a fully connected home of the future.
Want to find out about the quality of our work? Just look at what over 1,000 happy customers had to say about us here.
Call today to discuss our fantastic range of garage door styles, to book an appointment or to get a ballpark quote for a new garage door in the South East – including Buckinghamshire, Kent, Devon, Hampshire, Surrey, West Sussex and London.
