Making a home is like building any relationship: the more love you put in, the more you get out.
But there’s a bonus with your home. When it’s time to go your separate ways, you can make a tidy profit.
These two investments—love and money—go hand in hand. Spruce up your home with your dream features, and you could boost its eventual sale value by more than the features cost. Of course, this is more effective if your dream feature is pendant lighting or a farmhouse sink rather than, say, a sunken ball pit or a firefighter’s pole.
So, which features are most attractive to buyers? Angi is on a mission to help you build the best home to live in and the best home to sell. We combed Zillow for sold properties with common or trending added features and used math to figure out the price premium associated with each feature. (You’ll find our full methodology at the foot of this page.)
We’ve highlighted the ten most profitable features and the best for each room and metropolitan area, and included our full lists at the end so you can justify your own dream feature to your other half.
Please note, our study reveals correlation, not causation. These home features will not definitively add the associated premium to your home. It is likely that the premium is closely related to the additional care that owners of homes with these features have put into their homes and their sales process.
Flick through the gallery below to reveal the top 10 details that correlate with a boost in property value. Kitchen features dominate the list, reflecting the centrality of the kitchen to a sense of home.
Fancy lighting, pretty countertops, and talking-point sinks occupy two top spots each. Even if you don’t like the particular examples that made the top 10, these categories may be the ones most worthy of your attention if you find an alternative that speaks to you.
“I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a… pot filler?” Also known as kettle faucets, potboilers may not be the most poetic or sexy of features, but they literally stood out in the kitchen and became the hot thing for homemakers during the cooking craze of the pandemic.
The potboiler is just a water tap above your hob. But treat it as a furniture/design feature rather than a tool, and you’ll make a real impression on potential buyers, who’ll picture themselves filling giant pasta pots with panache as charmed dinner guests look on.
Next, we identified the top investment for each room of the house. In the bathroom, your best bet is a double sink vanity. The bathroom is the most personal place in the house, and individual basins multiply a viewer’s sense of the private space they could enjoy. Dual sinks may even answer a relationship problem a potential buyer had not yet voiced. And the concept is available as a nicely-priced IKEA hack.
Few outdoor features made the top of our list, but some homes and some buyers will benefit from added flourish in the garden. An outdoor kitchen gives the biggest boost, particularly as we’ve learned to love the home entertaining/outdoors combo—outdoor kitchen sales jumped 106% in the first six months of the pandemic. The secret to making your garden kitchen a selling point is to focus not just on the kit but on the ambiance.
The figures above reflect nationwide trends. But we also zeroed in on the 43 metropolitan areas for which strong enough data was available to reveal the home features trending locally.
The metro with the most emphatic sale-booster is New York-Newark-Jersey City, where the presence of a garage correlates with a price increase of 18.47%. The home garage is a conundrum because building one from scratch eats into precious garden or driveway space. However, in eight of the 43 metros in our study, a garage is the most profitable feature.
On the other hand, if you already have a garage, you might consider converting it into an extra living space. But buyers have come to expect a garage or carport. Some 63% of American homes have one—even if some are more likely to use it for storage than an actual car. If you are tempted to convert your garage to a living space, make sure it’s done well and in sympathy with the rest of the property. The idea is to add a sense of space, so it’s important not to create a ‘weird little room’ that buyers aren’t sure how to utilize.
Adding genuine details to your Zillow listing can help draw in potential buyers—consider them virtual ‘curb appeal.’ But we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars: if the job’s not done right, curious buyers will notice the flaws on closer inspection. If you’re not confident you can make quality improvements yourself, hire a professional. Your home is an investment, and saving money here may prove a false economy.
Not sure which features might boost your particular property’s value? Check out our full list of Zillow premiums below for inspiration.
To create these tables, we built a long list of home features using authoritative sources such as Better Homes & Gardens, European Cabinets, and Fool. We analyzed 251,292 house listings on Zillow from across the US and calculated the price premium associated with popular features in every room of the house.
Log-linear regression was used to estimate a percentage price difference as a function of the presence of each of the selected features.
Results are only reported for features meeting three conditions: they appear in at least 100 listing descriptions of sold homes (25 for metro level); their estimated coefficient in the regression was statistically significant at the 10% level; the estimated coefficient is greater than zero (i.e., feature has a positive impact on price).
Adding these design features to a home, or just adding these words to a for-sale listing description, does NOT guarantee or definitively cause the ultimate sale price to increase (or fall) as much as observed. Rather, the most likely explanation for these results is that for-sale homes with these kinds of features in their descriptions may be of generally higher quality all around.
The data were collected in November–December 2021.
