Betterment - how to make your investment bear more fruit

The target: raising the monthly income and/or the property's worth.

How to: define your customer, discover his needs and fulfill them.

Here are some ideas for you, how to maximize the potential of your property, in order to make a bigger yield out of it:

Renovate wisely - ask yourself who is your customer: is it for rent, or for sale? Is the buyer an investor or seeking to buy himself a house? Is it a couple, a family, a student? You need to fit the property and the planned betterment to the client’s needs.

• Renewing the infrastructure - this will elongate the life expectancy of your property and cause the physical deterioration to be less frequent. Begin with the renovation of the bathroom, more specifically, with replacing the pipe system.
• Aesthetics - even just a little touch, such as re-painting the walls or cleaning the building’s stairway, can help raise the property’s value. You could change the tiles, the closets in the kitchen and bathroom, and the sinks.
• Creating more rooms - a three rooms apartment is more expensive than a two rooms apartment, even if they are both the same size. If your property is in an area with a lot of families, for example, you could make the rooms smaller and create another room, allowing a young family to expand.
• Making bigger rooms - In different cases, it is preferable to loose a room in order to make the others bigger and more practical. In a student flat, for example, the tenants would want to have big and spacious rooms.
• Improve the living - add another toilets and another bathroom.
• Furniture - add furniture, but only if that would make the property more desirable for your potential buyers. A wealthy family, For example, would most probably want to buy her own furniture. Furthermore, putting prestigious furniture in a property that is in a low socioeconomic area, won’t help you getting more rent, because it will not match your potential tenants needs.
• Smart house! Turn on the air conditioning or the boiler before you get home, using your smartphone. How nice is that? You can also install Faucet aerators, frugal light bulbs, advanced security systems (to lower the insurance price), high tech irrigation system, etc. All those would make the living in the house cheaper, and would thus make the property more desirable and worthy.
• Parquet floors - or even just new pavements.
• Judge the book by its cover -clean the property’s surroundings, install lights in the building’s staircase and clean the entrance.
• Check if the building is entitled of TAMA 38 (״National Outline Plan 38״ for the seismic strengthening of existing buildings). If not, with the approval of the other apartment owners in the building, you could also renovate by yourself: build an elevator (will bring to up to 20% raise in the apartments value), add parking spaces, make a nice lobby, etc. Expensive, but it will raise the apartments value by tens percents.
• Balconise yourselves! Build a balcony, and win an extra 10% rise in the apartment’s value. For this you need the approval of ¾ of the apartment owners, and a glass of wine to sit with and watch the sunsets.
• Residential secure space - the importance of a secure space in buildings and even apartments in Israel is crucial.
• Parking? YES. Not on the expense of a private garden, Though, But in areas that lack parking, consider creating parking spots in the building’s not utilized common areas or on the expense of the plantation in the entrance. Adding parking to the building will bring to a 10% raise in the apartments value, and and extra 5% if we’re talking about roofed parking.
• The little details create a big change - Tacky, but precise. Get an air conditioner for each room, instead of a central system. Build a Solar water heating boiler, add a little store room, install underfloor heating, and whatever can make living in this property more desirable (do not forget, though, to think about your potential buyer or renter).

So, how did it go? Send us pictures and we’ll hang them on a little wall of fame on our facebook. It is unethical to prevent other people a pick to your beautiful inspiring houses.