Bryan Vogt: Welcome back to Ready, Set, Sold. I am your host, Bryan Vogt. Thanks so much for joining us this Saturday. We left you with the question of what about not having enough bathrooms? What if you don’t think you have enough bedrooms? What should you do in those situations? Well, at the top of the hour when we started the show, in the first segment we talked about this situation of you don’t want to ever improve or create new living space. You always want to focus on your current living space, and bedroom and bathrooms fall into that category.
Again, we talked about before the three reasons why usually this comes into play is number one, your realtor might be suggesting you put another bathroom or bedroom in. We also said what we said with the hardwood floors, what we said with the basements, you need to fire that realtor. We’re firing a lot of people today. I get that, okay, but that’s not the direction you want to go. The second reason why people want to do it is they fall themselves into lack, that they don’t have enough.
Look, in those situations, okay, and there can be exceptions of course, but most situations if you lived in a house that had three bedrooms and one bathroom and you’ve been there for 10 years, well it’s worked out pretty well for you. Understanding that what you have is what you have. The third thing that comes into play, and this maybe in the one that you have to be the most careful of, that people make these bathroom changes, these bedroom changes with the idea they’re going to make more money. That is rarely if ever true.
Start thinking about this. First off, just the point of adding a bedroom or bathroom, your house was build however long ago with the idea of whatever bedrooms and bathrooms it had to start with. It’s already set up to two bedroom, one bath or three bedroom, one bath or even a four bedroom, two bath and you think you need to have three baths. Where are you going to put it? What are you going to sacrifice on the other side? Usually that’s the basement. That might sound good, but again most bathrooms when you do them right can run anywhere between, I know we’ve seen between 10 and $15,000, okay? Again, you don’t get dollar for dollar, and most sellers understand that.
Again, especially when you have one down in the basement, we talked about earlier about you might be talking a third. You might be spending $15,000 and a net return of $3,000. That’s a $12,000 loss, and it happens. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in the basement, whether it’s in the upstairs, wherever you’re trying to put that bathroom, that is not the direction that you want to go, because you’re going to lose money. It’s almost, I won’t say guaranteed, but it’s so, so risky.
Same thing with bedrooms. Quite frankly, after three bedrooms, it becomes four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
But if you have two bedrooms, can it work? Look, we have sold houses to buyers that have a family of four. Maybe the children are smaller. Maybe they’re the same sex, so it’s not that big of a deal. You have two boys, you have two girls. We’ve had situations where again maybe you have a three month old and maybe you have a two year old, three year old. If you’re a parent of you’re going to be a parent, I can tell you right now having been a parent or currently a parent, having that extra child there to make sure that the littlest one goes asleep is not a bad idea. That can be a win/win situation.
Now we talked about the fact is that you don’t have it. Now, understand when you bought the house, and you might need to go back maybe a little bit, but probably there was an adjustment made on the price you bought this home for. I’m not talking a major adjustment, but there probably was a slight adjustment.
That’s the first place you want to look at in saying, “Okay, look. Yeah, I understand I only have three bedrooms, two bath and others have four bedrooms and three baths,” or whatever that combination is. There’s probably going to be a slight difference in pricing, but not should be most cases, and there’s exceptions to every rule, but shouldn’t be a gigantic reduction.
The other part that you can do, and especially if you have a two bedroom, one bath, and this is actually … or three bedroom, one bath house, what you should be doing is again making your current living space better. Instead of rushing out trying to spend $15,000 or $10,000 or whatever trying to put a new bathroom in or 5 or 6,000, 7,000 trying to put another bedroom in, what sellers have had fantastic success in is going in and making that one bathroom I mean the bathroom.
I mean spending a couple of thousand dollars and putting ceramic tile in, and maybe a pedestal sink, and making the coloring, and maybe doing some back splash, and making sure that maybe there’s some ceramic where the shower’s at. Make that thing pop, okay? That is going to do much, much more better way of getting return on investment and getting your house sold fast than trying to even think about putting another bathroom in.
Same thing with bedrooms. If you don’t have the bedrooms, you also have the option of the kitchen. Upgrade a little bit more on the kitchen. Again, making sure that maybe you have a back splash. Look at the flooring situation, making sure that the flooring is really … again it could be ceramic tile. Maybe it’s a wood veneer, but make it extra special. Again, be willing to spend a couple of thousands dollars, but your return on investment of getting that back and having a fast sale is going to more than most times pay off for that, for that time and also that effort you go into.
As we said before is do not, do not go into the idea of improving. Now, I haven’t even talked about improving, adding more living space. Just work on improving what you have. I haven’t talked about it, and hopefully people just don’t. I don’t think I have heard too many people ever doing it, but if you’re thinking about adding an extra room onto your house to sell it, that’s just no. That’s a nonstarter. There’s so many different reasons for that.
The cost, I mean the cost of adding on to a home is usually triple the amount of the square footage of the cost. There’s just not a good reason to do that. Again, adding fireplaces in, things of that nature. We’ve seen people try to do that. Look, unless they’re standalone situations, that’s fine. Maybe they’re plugins, they look good. but as far as actually putting a fireplace in, that’s happened a few times and that doesn’t work well either.
With that, what we’re going to be talking about in the next segment is we’re going to be doing a wrap up, but we’re also going to be talking about what we’re doing for next week, and you do not want to miss it. Hey, pick up my book. Just get the book right now. Go to ReadySetSold.org, not .com, ReadySetSold.org, not .com. Pick up the book. Get the book. Give it to a friend. You don’t have to use me, but it has this information and much, much more.
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