Make your clients' home improvements count

A remodeled bathroom. A recently renovated kitchen. A new roof.

How could these updates increase a home’s value? Clients want to get the most for their house, and who can blame them? As a Realtor®, you want to provide them with accurate information to make these decisions. Realtors® need an efficient, yet accurate, way to calculate home improvement values.

Free to members of the National Association of Realtors® (NAR), Realtors® Property Resource (RPR®) offers the tool “Refine the Value Based on Home Improvements” to let you take the guesswork out of calculating renovations. It calculates home improvements down to the zip code level.

Let’s look at three different examples of how this tool helps Realtors® help clients get the most out of their home.

1. A homeowner in downtown Harrisburg is looking to list his house. He wants to ensure that while his house is “priced to sell,” the list price reflects the kitchen upgrade. You find out by asking the homeowner how much he spent upgrading the kitchen and learn that he spent $46,000 in February 2013. By using RPR’s® home improvements tool, you find that the $46,000 mid-range kitchen remodel is worth $25,958 today.
2. Homebuyers in Wilkes-Barre are looking at buying two different houses. One is ‘move-in ready’ and the other needs some work. The homebuyers aren’t opposed to buying a home and doing some remodeling, but they want to know if it will be worth it. Using RPR’s® “home improvements tool, you calculate that by replacing the garage door, upgrading the windows and remodeling a bathroom, the home’s value will increase by nearly $17,000.
3. Past clients in Pittsburgh are wondering if they should spend their money on remodeling the house they currently live in, or move to something that already has the upgrades they are looking for. Naturally they turn to their trusted Realtor® for advice. After doing a search for homes that meet their criteria should they want to move, you can use RPR’s® home improvements tool to put in all the improvements they want to make to their existing house, create a comp analysis that includes both their current property and the “move-in ready” properties to allow them to decide which option best suits them.

As you can see, there are many uses for the “Refine the Value Based on Home Improvements” tool within RPR®. And because the data comes from a trusted source, you can be sure that the information you provide to your clients is accurate. So whether they decide to shop for new granite or windows, you know that you’ve helped them not only make an educated decision, but once again showed that you are truly the local market expert.