Eug
Senior Member
Yes, that's what they say, but it often is extremely impractical.It's why they say you should buy the worst looking house on a great street instead of the best looking house on a bad street.
I had that very dilemma. I was looking at two houses, about the same price.
1) One was a very nice and pretty large middle class house on a big lot. The area is middle class. Not upper class, but not lower working class either. Everything was great in the house as is, except the basement. The basement was liveable, but crappily done, and was something I'd want to upgrade later, while I was living in the home. I was guessing it would cost me 2-5% more for the basement upgrade. It ended up costing me more because I ended up doing way more than I had originally planned (including a redesign of the centre support structures and the HVAC system), but the reno was still was less than 10% of the original cost of the house.
2) The other was a tired bungalow built in the 70s. Definitely livable, but extremely dated, and not as big as I'd like. The lot was OK, and was of average size. The benefit though was that it was in a very upscale area. When I called them to see if there was room for the seller to negotiate on price, they told me it was essentially a tear down price, even though it was quite livable. I guessed at the time it would take me another 20% of the cost of the house to upgrade it to how I'd like it, but having gone through the basement reno now I'm thinking in retrospect it would have cost way more than that. Probably 25-40% of the original purchase price or more. Plus, it would have meant not being able to live there for a year or whatever while the place was getting renovated.
I bought the former. Somebody else bought the latter a while later, and in fact tore the whole thing down and started over completely. I don't know how much it's worth, but I'd guess if it went on sale, it'd be over twice the original price.
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