Surprising Factors That Can Affect Your Home’s Value

Besides the obvious factors - such as square footage, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, lot size, and location - there are some quirky elements that can affect your home’s value. Other, less obvious features can negatively or positively come into play — features you might not have considered. Here are frequently overlooked (and not always fixable) things that, for better or for worse, can impact the value of your home.

People typically prefer the street they live on to have a name versus a number. According to a recent study, “street” is the least expensive address suffix by price per square foot, and “boulevard” is the most expensive.

 

Ever heard of house numerology? This is the practice of assigning a single-digit number to your home based on its address. Let’s say your address is 1219 Main St. Add 1 + 2 + 1 + 9 to get 13. Then add 1 + 3. Your house would be 4: good for investments and security but bad for adventure and excitement. While this type of house numerology may be passed off as a superstition, buyers who subscribe to this theory may overlook potential homes because of their numerology calculations. However, whether or not you’re into numerology, house numbers do matter. If your address is 13 (a universally unlucky number), you might choose to price your home slightly less than your neighbor at number 12 did.

 

The closer you live to your neighbour, the more important it will be for your tastes, habits, and personalities to jibe with theirs. Owners of single-family homes can thank fastidious neighbours with good taste to increase the values of all nearby homes. But, of course, the opposite is also true.

 

It’s common practice for developers to cut down most of (or all!) the trees on a property to build homes. But mature trees almost always enhance property values. Still don’t believe it? Check out the National Tree Benefit Calculator to see the full benefits of planting specific types of trees. If you have the space, make a trip to your local nursery to discuss the best tree options for your home.

If you’ve worked hard to select just the right neutral and serene paint color scheme that will probably attract the most buyers, you’re doing yourself a disservice if you neglect one important element: crown moldings. Although you can’t do anything about how high your ceilings are, you can put in crown moldings — even with lower ceilings. Just make sure they work with the scale of the room, and don’t veer too far into the trend zone.

Blue Jays fans, relax. We’re not picking on just you. Although this anecdote happens to be about the Toronto baseball team, you could insert any team here. Many people can be turned off, especially Orioles fans. If you don’t want to alienate a potential buyer, you might want to stash the fan gear away while your home is on the market.

 

And H.Y. Louies and Whole Foods. If you have any of those establishments close by, typically within a mile, up goes your property’s value.

 

On average, once the buyers find out there had been a death on a property, two out of five buyers that were interested suddenly say, ‘thanks, but no thanks.’ There’s even a name for a home someone died in: stigmatized. But even if your province doesn’t have a death disclosure requirement, certainly if someone asks, you should fess up. It’s the right thing to do.

 

Have you discovered an unusual factor while calculating your home’s property value estimate that skewed your home’s value? Share it with us in the comments!