Love it or List it is one of my favorite shows…..but they are aren’t giving you a good picture of reality.

On Love it or List it only part of the house gets an amazing makeover.

Here is my beef. Value. At the end of both shows, they tell the owners that the money they spent to improve their property paid back more than 100% of the investment. What they don’t tell you is that appraised value really has nothing to do with market value. Appraised value is what it should be worth. Market value is what it IS worth.

From working with a ton of buyers for over 8 years now, I can tell you with absolute certainty that going overboard renovating a few rooms of your house and neglecting the rest does not add much value at all….at least not in Lexington Ky! The buyers who will be attracted to the fancy new work will be turned off by the untouched rooms. Buyers who don’t mind the untouched rooms will not want to pay for the fancy new stuff. The new work just makes it more obvious that the rest of the house got passed over. The house is too polarizing. If the homeowners on this show really wanted to sell, they would have done better to spread the same amount of their cash over the entire house rather than go over the top with a few select rooms.

I sold a house earlier this year that could have been a Love it or List it house. It had an $80k kitchen remodel. High end everything. 3 ovens. One of the most amazing slabs of granite I have ever seen. It also had bathrooms from the early 90’s. The rest of the house just couldn’t deliver what that kitchen did. It was a nice house, but that kitchen didn’t add $80k in value. My buyer got a good deal though. Funny thing is he doesn’t really care about the kitchen at all.