They forgot the biggest one: #30 Be located in a location where it's illegal to add more housing supply.

No, you can not just add solar panels to a house and make it worth 40% more. Literally every home would have solar panels on it if that were even remotely true. The truth is that you are unlikely to make your money back on most home improvement projects, especially if you hire a contractor.

Also there is an upper limit on how much you can increase the value of your home because you are limited by the value of your neighbor's homes and nearby comparable homes. If you spend more on improvements than that upper limit, you are almost guaranteed to lose money.

Also most first time home buyers lose money anyway because they fail to properly assess the value of a property, they negotiate poorly, and they get emotional about it.

Having the phrase "solar panel" in a property description may correlate with a 40% increase in "expected sale price" (the blog post doesn't say what they mean by this), but having solar panels in your home correlates with all sorts of things that haven't been controlled for in the analysis (for instance how warm the local climate is).

Much more useful would be an estimate of how much a home's value would increase if solar panels were installed. That figure is certainly much less than 40%.

Reference: I built Opendoor's home valuation model.

This reads like a list of savvy remodels added to flipped homes in outrageously expensive areas. It's easy to imagine someone adding a solar roof, a fancy ceiling and a pergola to sell a 1,200 square foot bungalow in SV for way more than it's worth. But most of these would be almost impossible to add to any true starter home in the midwest, which probably average around 1,600 square feet - where do you add the mud room and home theater?

This is clearly for specific areas of the world. In Canada "gas furnace" is really the only option, and solar panels aren't terribly feasible.

That being said, I recently bought a home that checks a lot of those boxes (gas furnace, clawfoot tub, hardwood floor, central vac, mid-century) and it was on the market less than 24 hours with multiple offers, so clearly the items are valued. I just question the ability to add those percentages to it.

The author didn't do a very good job interpreting these statistics. The conditions that would exist when someone would choose to invest in solar panels exclude a large fraction of homes; solar panels are a recent enough addition for most that homes which have been allowed to fall into disrepair are excluded. They further exclude homes that don't have a view, homes that are part of a multi-unit bloc, and, in some cases, duplexes.

This is pretty meaningless without real dollar amounts.

The percentages seem more informative to me, since they are meaningful across different locations. If you don't know what 40% of a home price is in your area, do some research.

I believe that they are not meaningful across locations. Things like solar arrays and bathtubs have a similar cost around the country, but house prices can vary wildly.

This is plausible, but would imply that improvements like these would be more common in lower-house-cost areas, since they'd make a "bigger" difference. That doesn't seem to be the case.

Actual headline article is "29 Design Features That Helped Starter Homes Sell For More Than Expected" and it has home theater in the list.

Which starter home buyer is looking for home theater ? I live in bay area so may be I don't get it :) . For starter home, only requirement here is to be within 1.5 million dollar :D

I could be wrong but last time I checked you'd struggle to get a starter home for <1.5 mil in Cupertino CA :)

Which you can easily argue is not the place right now to be picking your Starter Home.

The point still stands.

It is in the bay area.

Which you can easily argue is not the place right now to be picking your Starter Home.

The point still stands.

Solar Panels is #1. What I've heard about that is there's no return on investment. What'd be a nice add-on to the article is the ROI figures for each feature.

Yah I think it varies from region to region too. I don't think a mudroom in souther California helps much. Would be great to see some research around this.

Real estate article is trending on hacker news :) #bayarea

Very Interesting...I wonder how much subway tiles would add to value? I always thought those were winners.

Sure does look like Quartz is beating Granite at this time.

In short, be trendy. The items that increase your value today could very well decrease it 5 years from now.

Sure, but chances are that many of your house's existing features are becoming progressively less trendy over time, and you could have something hard to sell (or daunting to update) if you don't do too much over a few decades of home ownership.

> chances are that many of your house's existing features are becoming progressively less trendy over time

Depends on the time window really.

Hardwood floors were considered dated and carpet luxurious for a while

Yes but spelling out which items are actually "trendy" is useful.

Also, if a feature is trendy enough for long enough, it starts becoming a pretty safe bet.

I'd also love to see some analysis on feature correlation. Is a central vac actually something that people pay more for, or is it something that is frequently noted in listings and correlates with features people do pay more for?

Yeah this was the first question I had! I mean if 100% of homes with heated floors also have tankless water heaters, the floors might actually account for 95% of the boost that's attributed to tankless heaters.

Or is it merely that central vac is highly correlated with square footage and neighborhood age, each of which might better predict prices.