I often run across articles in the news about what specific updates give the most return for the money spent.

While I appreciate that somebody took the time to research this, I sort of roll my eyes as I read them.

For example, if your house is a hot mess but you put a brand new garage door on, trust me, your house didn’t grow in value by 87% of the cost of that new garage door.

Why doesn’t it work that way? Well, because the buyer is looking at the whole house, not each individual feature.

A few weeks ago I showed a house that looked absolutely fabulous online. The kitchen and flooring were brand new. It was a total WOW house…..online.

When I pulled in the driveway, I wasn’t sure I was at the same house. I had to check the address!

The exterior of the place was very rough. The original windows had peeling paint and cracked window glazing. The driveway was cracked up and probably hadn’t been recoated since the 80s.

It didn’t get better once I got inside. The lockbox was on the backdoor. The addition on the back that I had to walk through had 1970s paneling that clearly had water damage under that fresh coat of paint. The basement was pretty much lipstick on the world’s ugliest pig.

But oh that kitchen!!!!

Here is the thing. The buyer who sees that kitchen and is willing to pay the seller back for their investment is expecting the rest of the house to be equally as nice. The buyer who doesn’t mind the condition of the rest of the house isn’t going to want to reimburse the seller for that gorgeous kitchen.

I see that all the time having shown houses like this for the past 19 years.

For this house, the seller didn’t really get much of a return. I think they might have sold for almost as much had they not done the kitchen at all. It would have been wiser to have taken the money spent on the kitchen and spread it evenly across the whole house, rather than put all their eggs in that one basket.