How To Make Money With Home Renovation

Can you really recoup your initial investment in your home? The answer is more or less yes, depending upon what types of renovations you perform. With billions of dollars spent annually on home renovation projects, the industry is clearly making a profit. However, as a homeowner you should choose your renovations carefully. Examine how much you'll need to spend and how much a successful renovation will actually add to your home.

A mid-range remodeling bathroom project costs, on average, about $10,500. This sounds like a lot of money, but it's possible that the project could add $10,750 to the value of your home. Doing the math, this means that you, the homeowner, will recoup about 102% of your renovation costs. Renovations in other parts of your home show similar trends.

Figures from the National Association of Realtors and Remodeling magazine indicate that homeowners can realistically expect to recoup a large percentage of their renovation costs. Like the bathroom, a mid-range kitchen remodeling averages about $43,000 but adds a value of $39,900 to your home, or a 92% recoup of renovation costs. You'll just about break even.

Replacing the old, inefficient windows through a mid-sized home costs on the average, $9,500, and will add $8,600 to the value of your home, or a recoup value of $90% of initial costs. You can renovate the master bedroom for about $76,000 and add $65,000 in value, or 85% recoup of your costs. Finally, the addition of a family room costs an average of $55,000 and returns $45,500 to your home - an 83% savings.

With the help of a well-informed real estate agent, you'll need to decide what renovations will truly enhance the selling value of your home. For example, not everyone needs a home office in their new home, but everyone needs a bathroom or two! Attractive borders around your kitchen wall turn out to be mere "fluff" if the paint in the dining room is peeling. Your real estate agent will make sure that potential buyers see the essential, quality renovations rather than the fluff.

Homeowners shouldn't undertake major renovations solely to turn a profit. Renovations are really for enjoyment and not for putting money in your pocket. However, if you're happy with the results of the renovations you have carried out and completed, and they increase the quality of life for you and your family, then your money has been well spent.

Author Steven Gaines takes us from New York's most expensive condominiums and co-ops to the offices of its most powerful real estate brokers to reveal the outlandish displays of ego, bad behavior, and status hunger that come into play when the best addresses in the city are on the line.

With his signature elan, Gaines weaves a gossipy tapestry of brokers, buyers, co-op boards, and eccentric landlords and tells of the apartment hunting and renovating adventures of many celebrities - from Tommy Hilfiger to Donna Karan, from Jerry Seinfeld to Steven Spielberg, from Barbra Streisand to Madonna.

Here, too, is a fascinating chronicle of the changes in Manhattan's residential skyline, from the slums of the nineteenth century to the advent of the luxury building. Gaines describes how living in boxes stacked on boxes came to be seen as the ultimate in status, and how the co-operative apartment, originally conceived as a form of housing for the poor, came to be used as a legal means of blackballing undesirable neighbors.

A social history told through brick and mortar, The Sky's the Limit is the ultimate look inside one of the most exclusive and expensive enclaves in the world, and at the lengths to which people will go to get in.

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