How Do Skylights Impact the Resale Value of a Home?
How Do Skylights Impact the Resale Value of a Home?
Before you embark on any type of remodel or renovation of your home you should always consider how said project will affect the home’s valuation. This is especially true if you plan on selling your home in the near to mid-term. The last thing you want is to discover the work you did to enhance your home actually caused its market value to suffer. Skylights are one popular home remodelling project that people have questions about. How do skylights impact the resale value of a home? Do they have ANY impact? In this post, the team at Rooflights & Roof Lanterns explore this question.
How Do Skylights Impact the Resale Value of a Home?
There are several ways skylights can have a positive impact on the value of a home.
Skylights enhance the kerb appeal of a house
Kerb appeal is defined as the way a home is perceived from the street by passersby. This may seem like an insignificant consideration but in reality, kerb appeal can impact the value of a home by as much as 10%. When viewed from the outside skylights provide visual interest and suggest an interior that is by turns elegant and sophisticated. While kerb appeal should not necessarily be the driving force that determines where you place your skylight or skylights, it should definitely be taken into consideration.
Skylights make a home more energy efficient
A great many homes in the UK, even homes constructed in the past 20-30 years, include large areas that require supplemental electric light even during the daytime. Skylights provide a way to bring light into poorly illuminated areas thereby negating the need to have the lights on all or most of the day. It is a rare home indeed that will not experience some degree of energy savings after the installation of skylights. And in certain cases those energy savings can be significant. Skylights that open can also help reduce air conditioning costs during the summer months by greatly improving air circulation throughout the house.
A more energy-efficient home is also a more valuable home
Skylights will not only produce value in the sense of reducing a home's energy consumption, but the knock-on effect of a more energy-efficient house is that it will also have greater market value. Numerous real estate industry studies indicate that energy-efficient homes command higher resale prices. In some cases as much as 5-8% more than comparable homes that are less energy efficient. Energy-efficient homes also tend to spend considerably less time on the market before they are snapped up.
Skylights also produce an array of benefits that are not directly related to a home’s market value, such as:
- Skylights in a loft can enable you to transform it into usable living space.
- Skylights enhance a home’s privacy by enabling you to keep your shades closed.
- More light inside the home can fend off depressive feelings during the winter.
- From a design perspective, skylights open up a space like nothing else will.
Why Some Buyers May Consider Skylights a Negative
As we have seen, installing skylights will enhance the value of a home in several ways. Still, it is not outside the realm of possibilities that some potential home buyers could view skylights in a negative way. And we’ll explain.
Some people may look at skylights and think: “Great, more work”. That is, instead of getting excited about how the skylights flood the space with light and how elegant and sophisticated they look, they focus instead on the fact that they may have to clean the skylights once in a while. To them, any amount of additional home maintenance is an automatic negative.
Others may look at skylights and see nothing more than the potential for heat gain during the summer and heat loss during the winter, even if it is not certain that would be the case. While still others fear that the skylight might spring leaks which would necessitate expensive repairs. Although that is a rare occurrence with properly installed skylights.
Essentially, those who see them as a negative tend to project the worst-case scenarios onto skylights and will not be dissuaded from their negative stance. At the end of the day, however, skylights are far more likely to add value to a home than they are to cause problems.
Contact Rooflights & Roof Lanterns
Skylights are the home remodelling gift that keeps on giving. They make your home brighter in the winter, cooler in the summer and they provide an array of benefits that will bolster the market value of the typical house. If you are looking for ways to make your home more energy efficient, more beautiful and more valuable, talk to the team at Rooflights & Roof Lanterns about installing a skylight or skylights. Our number is 020 8087 2004. Call today.
- Moshin
