20 Ways To Devalue Your House

Buying a home is a huge investment. Once there, you want to take care of your bricks and mortar. Here's how to make sure that the way you live in your home, and how you improve it don't have a negative impact.

Main road with traffic lights in foreground

We asked a panel of estate agents from across the country, some willing to be named, some really not, how the unwary homeowner can devalue a home.

1 Inherited Problems

These are issues that might not really have seemed like a problem when you first bought your property, but which might have gained in relevance since. This can include mobile phone masts or any other form of transmitter, pylons or power lines, roads that are suddenly scheduled for extension or airports ripe for expansion.

What might have been an aesthetic blip in the locale when you bought the property can swiftly become a plug hole down which the value of your property inexorably slides. But nature can play a part too. Ancient and protected trees can develop a nasty habit of shedding heavy branches when stressed, or dripping bug secretions over expensive thatch. Unpredicted accelerated coastal erosion in some areas of the Norfolk coast, meanwhile, has turned the pleasure of an uninterrupted ocean view into a depressed stare into the precipice of imminent homelessness.

Then there is human nature to consider. If you bought property with inherited bad will from a neighbour before the 1990s, no matter how unreasonable the behaviour on their part this may well impact on the price you sell your home for.

While some of these problems are easier to predict than others, Melanie Heath of Hamptons International suggests that: 'As a general rule of thumb properties that are by a main road or situated close to power lines, and railway lines can in some instances be negotiated down by 10-15%.'

2 Casual Neglect

To many, a home is simply an uninteresting, though essential box within which they pursue the activities that REALLY interest them. Consequently the rather dull matter of maintaining the property gets sidelined. Regardless of how well built your home was, it will require some of that pesky TLC from time to time.

Roofs can get damaged, guttering become blocked and then fail, and you ignore major cracks in the walls (often a symptom of subsidence ) at your peril.

Charles Seligman, Associate Director at FPD Savills in Sloane Street, London sees this as being a potentially serious drain on property value. 'You just can't neglect the fabric of a property and not expect it to impact on the potential value. I'm very lucky in that I deal on the whole with extremely good properties, otherwise in this area you could expect neglect to cost you anything from £5,000 to £50,000 or above.'

3 Notoriety

A home that was used as a meeting place for early 20th century revolutionaries can expect a boost in desirability and therefore value because of the inherited kudos. But a property more recently associated with far left or far right leaning organisations or even worse, a terrorism suspect, can suffer in terms of value.

Ugly kitchen with missing tiles and old cooker

4 The Wrong Kitchen

One man's meat is another man's reformed animal by-products, as no-one says when describing differences in taste. The simple fact is, if you spend an awful lot of money installing a kitchen that no-one else likes, then you could put buyers off entirely, or find they try to negotiate you down with the cost of changing it in mind.

Charles Seligman of FPD Savills suggested that a design faux pas of this sort in Chelsea might erase a good £30,000 from the price of a property.