Renovations before sale

doing considerable renovations right before a sale, especially in this market, is often a bad idea.

and the reason it is a bad idea, I should elaborate, si ebcause your not going to get back 100% of the cost. I think kitchens for instance only yield about 70% returns.

Noah at UD did a great post about a year ago about whether to renovate right before selling. Here are some highlights:

A. Renovate the kitchen - DEFINITELY NOT! It will cost about $20-$25K (min for gut renovation on most kitchens - add 10-15K easily for high end renovation on kitchen) or more to redo your entire kitchen, plus 1-2 months of contracting work that you have to deal with. In addition, kitchens are a very personal room that most buyers like to fit into their own taste. If your renovations conflict with the potential buyers taste, you may NOT get any premium when you go to resell.

Now, given current market conditions and our quick prediction on what the market might be like in 2 years, how are we to expect top dollar for this type of renovation where we cant guarantee the buyer will even like it? We can't! Pass on this given the situation at hand as to me it looks like a high risk (due to high cost), low reward (premium not guaranteed) scenario.

http://www.urbandigs.com/2008/04/renovating_in_a.html

A lot of this depends on how you go about your renovations and your ability to GC your own projects. Over the past 15 to 20 years, we've gotten at least as good a return on our renovation dollars (and sometimes more) than on our investment dollars.

Bumping this up for more peple to respond