The way you have lived in your home worked well for you and your family’s needs, big or small. But perhaps there’s a part of the property which you had very little use for. Or a long overdue upgrade of something was just not worth the hassle (or the cost). You’ve looked past it for so long that you scarcely even notice it anymore.
But now that you’re about to sell the property you’ve called home for so long, that overgrown front hedge, the rotted out back deck and the leftovers from a previous owner’s 1986 kitchen and bath reno might need to be revisited (or if we’re talking ’86 maybe they need a Sledgehammer!)
If you’ve gone ahead and made some other upgrades over the years like new hardwood flooring, installed a high efficiency heat pump with central A/C or had the roof replaced then some of the above defects might seriously reduce the potential sale price of your home.
The value killer for sellers is inconsistency. You may have done the nicest kitchen reno money could buy 2 years ago, but if your front yard is an encyclopedia of weeds, buyers are going to have a hard time shaking the first impression (if they even make it to the kitchen).
Today’s market is increasingly shifting in favour of buyers (this is July ’24 for future reference), so showcasing homes as “move-in-ready” will be key to enticing full price buyers or multiple offers.
The way to think about curb appeal improvements is in terms of the price band that your home could potentially aspire to or to whether the improvements might push you into the top range of the price band from the middle range, for instance.
You will need to be realistic. Short of a complete gutting of the interior and exterior an entry-level single family home on the North Shore ($1.7-2.1M in today’s market) cannot aspire to the $2.5M+ price band. You will need to spend six to eight hundred thousand dollars on such a project, taking at least a year, and the end result might be a home that still only fetches $2.3M.
However, those same entry level homes might be able to achieve the top of the price band by making some strategic improvements at a fraction of the cost.
In future posts on this topic, we’ll discuss what sorts of improvements will help you generate a positive return on investment and which you should leave for the new owner to do themselves. 
