Homeowners who are ready to sell their homes can throw their house on the market and hope for a bidding war, or they can invest a little time and money into their home’s curb appeal and watch an actual bidding war happen.
A recent study from the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics set out to quantify just how much more a homeowner can make when they improve their curb appeal. By examining Google Street View photos and comparing them with the sold prices of homes, researchers observed that homes with upgraded exteriors sold for 7-14% more than other homes.
If your home is listed at $350,000, investing in your home’s exterior could yield an extra $24,000-$49,000 from your home sale.
If you’re ready to tackle the work it’ll take to maximize your home’s curb appeal, here are nine surefire ways to overhaul your home’s exterior.
Refresh Your Landscaping
Even if you had your yard designed and installed by a professional landscaper, it’s still a good idea to start your exterior overhaul by critically evaluating the current state of your yard. Growing trees may have overwhelmed the rest of your yard, and formerly vibrant bushes may have died after a bug infestation. Now is the perfect time to step back and see your landscaping through the eyes of a potential homebuyer.
Clear Out Dead Plants
As satisfying as a closet decluttering session, clearing out the dead plants that aren’t working in your landscape design can help you get a good look at the bare spots and trouble areas that you’ll need to address. Start with the easiest task of weeding out the flower beds, and then move on to digging up dead bushes. Finally, take the opportunity to trim up the trees and remove low-hanging or dead branches.
Pro-tip: Never cut off more than one-third of a tree at a time, and be sure to trim the branch back to the tree trunk so that the tree can heal properly.
Accent Your Yard With Blooming Bushes and Flowers
Since you’re not only trying to fix your landscaping, but also trying to impress some potential buyers, planting blooming bushes and flowers is the best way to nail that first impression. Add in an instant “Wow!” factor with brightly-colored blooms that pop in your front yard. If you anticipate putting your home on the market later in the year, you could invest in fast-growing bushes or trees to quickly fill in holes in your landscaping.
Pro-tip: Planting phlox, rosemary, lavender, jasmine, citronella, or any other highly-scented flower or bush is another way to charm buyers as they walk up to your front entryway.
Give Your Lawn Some Love
There are almost a dozen varieties of grasses that are grown in different climates across the U.S. The fertilizers you’d put on Bermuda grass might kill a lawn full of centipede grass, so if you’re unsure about the kind of grass you have in your yard, reach out to a home and garden center. Your minimum goal should be having a healthy lawn without any dead spots.
Pro-tip: The cost of grass seed and fertilizer can add up quickly, especially if you have a large lawn. Hiring a professional lawn service provider to get your lawn into tip-top shape may be the best use of your time and money.
Focus On the Home’s Exterior
Today’s homebuyers start their home search online, and at the top of every listing is often an oversized picture of a home’s exterior. What should be an immediate hook that invites buyers to check out the rest of the listing can also cause them to immediately click away if the shabby outside hints that the interior wasn’t well-maintained either.
Spray Down the Exterior
Just like clearing dead plants can prepare the landscape for a makeover, a good pressure washing gives homeowners a clean slate to begin their exterior upgrades. Start your outside remodeling with these seven steps.
- Rent or borrow a pressure washer.
- Wear waterproof shoes and clothes, or prepare to get wet.
- Move patio furniture, flower pots, barbecue grills, and outside wreaths away from the house.
- Cover electrical outlets with duct tape.
- If using a mildewcide, mix the solution and spray the house, starting from the bottom and moving up.
- Then spray the house down with water, starting from the top and moving down.
- Wait a few days for the house to dry before taking on any repairing or painting projects.
With a good spray down of last year’s accumulated dirt behind them, homeowners can begin address other neglected areas.
Front Door Update Packs a Punch
One of the easiest updates homeowners can invest in is as simple as a quart of paint. After analyzing over 100,000 homes, Zillow found that homes with a black front door sold for an average of $6,271 more than other homes. Why? Maybe it’s the traditional feel of the color black, or the understated elegance it brings to a front entryway. No one really knows, but spending $15 on a quart of paint and getting back $6,000 is a pretty remarkable ROI!
Updating the House Color
While you’re painting the front door, it may also be time to take a good hard look at your home’s siding. Peeling or faded spots on your home’s exterior is a classic sign of lack of TLC. If you’re trying to sell your home for top dollar, you’ll want to have a spotless exterior paint job.
Depending on your location, your weather, and even the color of your home, you may have to repaint your home’s exterior as often as once every five years. Dark colors like black or red can lose their vibrancy faster in bright sunshine compared to more neutral colors such as white or beige. And homes made of stucco or wood siding may need to be repainted once every three to seven years, while a painted brick home can last almost 15 years.
The color of the house itself can also reduce a home’s price. According to Zillow, yellow homes sell for around $3,400 less than similar homes with a different exterior paint color. Like the Tuscan browns and reds from the 1990s, dated color combinations can signal to buyers that your home’s interior is also stuck in the ‘90s. Maximizing your curb appeal can be as simple as bringing your home’s exterior colors into this decade.
For help in choosing an attractive color that will appeal to more homebuyers, you can upload a photo on the Sherwin Williams website so that you can virtually paint your home before committing to a new color.
Invest in Hardscaping
In landscape design, softscape refers to the grass, trees, bushes, and flowers in a yard or all of the “soft” elements. Hardscape, on the other hand, are the permanent fixtures in a yard that create shape and definition. As your eyes move across a property, hardscape features give your eyes a place to rest, and they can delineate areas of a yard.
Build a Hardscape Feature
Hardscaping can include a variety of elements, depending on the homeowners’ tastes and/or the property’s features.
- Fences
- Curbing
- Garden borders
- Water fountains
- Retaining walls
- Stone, brick, or concrete pathways
- Patios and decks
- Pergolas, trellises, and arbors
Whether you choose to go the DIY route or you decide to hire a professional landscaper, you should carefully consider which hardscaping features best enhances your property before beginning the project.
Create Outdoor Living Spaces
More than ever, homeowners are opting to relax and entertain at home. Even though the demand for outdoor living spaces has been steadily increasing for the last decade, the uncertainty in 2020 put that demand front and center for homeowners. By creating an outdoor space filled with privacy and shade, homeowners can increase the size of their living space without altering their actual square footage. This could be as simple as adding an outdoor fire pit, or as elaborate as building a covered deck complete with an outdoor kitchen.
Repair Hardscaping
If you already have good, solid hardscaping bones in your landscaping design, you may only need to clean up or repair your hardscape. By repairing cracks in the cement or restaining your deck, you’ll give your previous landscaping investments a facelift. Check out this AgentStory article for more quick and affordable tips to repair existing hardscaping.
The Bottom Line
Maximizing your home’s curb appeal can be as simple as painting your front door jet black, or as complicated as building a new deck. Maybe it suits your budget to address just a few small projects, or it’s time to undertake a front-yard overhaul.
Whatever route you decide to take to maximize your curb appeal, you can feel confident that investing in your home’s exterior will improve your home’s sale price.
