I hope you enjoy your home for the rest of your lives.

We purchased a custom house built in the 80's and nothing had been done to update it over the years. The sellers had a hard time selling because every buyer offered much less because of the money it would take to update the home.

We got the house for $290,000, when it was really worth about $500,000. So far, we sunk $150,000 for a complete remodel inside and out.

The R word is in the back of our heads because we are in our late sixties, and know that one day the stairs will be a problem along with the steepness of the yard slope. BUT, we will enjoy it for as long as we can.

It's really a trade off. You keep up with trends and spend the money to do so and get it back on the resale, or you don't spend, and take a big cut on your sales price.

Enjoy your home!

I spent 24 years in the US Navy Submarine Service. Moved frequently!!!!

The R word was VERY important to my wife and I. Good schools were important and now that we are in our seventies godd school is still an important component to the R word.

I'm glad the OP is comfortable with their choice to ignore the R word, however many of us not only embrace the word but find that we can have our wishes and desires satisfied within the scope of the R word!

I'm glad I could easily sell my home now and leave MD to live near granddaughters and family in CA, IN, or CT. And when we bought there we'd still want our good schools, SS appliances and the other things that also make us happy while appealing to the masses.

These two objectives are NOT mutually exclusive to may of us.

YMMV

This post was edited by saltidawg on Sun, Aug 3, 14 at 16:08

Oh clearly you're right that when you move frequently and know your stay in a house is short-term, then resale is an important element...you want to get as much value out of the home when you sell so you can afford the next one, no doubt.

But when you are building a custom home for yourself, be it a forever home or not, the point of custom is, well, to customize it to your specific tastes and needs. If you build only for resale, to appeal to the masses, then why go custom at all? Just buy spec or an existing home.

And you are right that they are not always mutually exclusive...it's great when they aren't...but when you have a choice to make, do you choose for Mr & Mrs Hypothetical? Or do you choose what you like and figure when you do go to sell, there'll be someone else who likes what you do? Or figure they can change it just as you did to suit your tastes...

I believe that the "R word" envisions a couple who doesn't even exist. There's an image of the family with 2-3 young kids, who entertain more than they don't and need a house to impress strangers, but don't need space for their cars or lawnmowers. Does that fit the majority of people you know? And yet, that's who the resale homes in my area are built for. There's a notion that EVERYONE has kids, or a least the vast majority. But, in reality, even if you do have kids, they only live with you for a very short period of your life. Assuming you live to be 80, and kids live at home for 20 years, you've got 60 years of adult life and only 1/3 of that is with your own kids at home. 40 years of the average adult life is spent WITHOUT children. And that doesn't account for couples who don't ever have children, or couples who split up and the children live with 1 spouse. And yet, all our houses are designed for families with children. And not just children, very young children. You MUST have a bathtub because 3 year olds don't take showers. Even if you sell, what are the odds that a 3 year old is ever going to live in your house? And if a 3 yr old does move in, how long will they live there? No longer than 1 year, because then they will no longer be a 3 yr old.

I don't have children, and won't be having them. I will never look for a house near a "good school". Even if it were to make my house more attractive to a family, I'd still have to pay the premium to get it in the first place. I'd rather pay less, and not worry about finding someone who is willing to pay more for it in the future. There are so many more families who don't need to worry about the nearby schools. I only need to sell my house to one of them.

So, after that rant, the "R word" has been in the back of my mind throughout the design, but more from the perspective of creating an asset rather than a liability. We looked at a couple of homes that were built as a someone's dream home, and then for whatever reason, they were selling them. In one case, the couple never even moved in, and then moved out of the country. They were both spectacular houses, but they were someone else's dream home. Nobody else was willing to pay what it had cost to build them. So while I would love to have a timber frame post & beam house, the cost of building it would never be recoverable. Geothermal heat would be awesome, but it would take about 50 years to make up the cost of installing it, so that's not going to be recouped in resale, either. I don't want to be in the position of having spent $2m building a house that is only worth $1.2m.

But I am not putting in a formal dining room. I don't use it. I am not having a formal living room. I don't need a room that only the dog uses, so it needs to be cleaned extra thoroughly before guests come over. My hall bathroom will not have a bath tub. I don't enjoy taking showers in bathtubs, so putting in a tub sized shower means that I'm more likely to use that bathroom. It breaks the "rules" for resale, but given that I'm building for a real person rather than an imaginary one, I don't care.

As for decor, colour choices are all so easily changed that I don't think it would make a huge difference on a selling price. And it's not been my experience that the stuff that "everyone" likes is actually universally loved. At best, it's inoffensive. I don't think boring and inoffensive is really my personality.

Yeah, resale is a lot about wow factor...what the potential buyer is going to see and say, "wow!" Unfortunately, many of those wows are not so wow to live with.

My Mom just sold the house my parents built in 1977. Mom designed it, using as inspiration the 5 houses she lived in that had horrible features. The house has 4 bedrooms, a wet bar, built-in bookcases.

Mom worried about finishes that would turn off buyers - 37-yr-old laminate counters; wallpaper in the dining room and hallway; a mauve accent wall in the living room; painted paneling in the family room.

One would expect a home that size to appeal to a family. But the buyer is a 70-yr-old man with no family, except for a couple of siblings. He probably won't even put furniture in half the house. But he loves the woods surrounding the house, he loves the location on the outskirts of town, and he loves the bookcases. He didn't give a hoot about the wallpaper.

I once had a builder tell me that building a house with resale (sorry, the "R" word) in mind is like marrying a woman because she will be easy to divorce. While I can understand someone who won't be there for a length of time being concerned about that, I would never worry about what some hypothetical future owner might think. If I want purple walls, purple walls I shall have. :)

desertdance, I don't know you so I obviously don't know your personal situation, but isn't part of what you're doing offering you the freedom to turn this home into what you want it to be and to do it in your own time and in your own way and on your own budget. If it was a $500k house that you got for $290k and you've spent another $150, well, you're closing in on the $500k. You could've bought someone else's finished product, but you would've been stuck with their taste. So sometimes not having it ready for resale may work in the transaction too.

When we sold our old house, our kitchen was neat, clean, functional and dated. We could've updated the kitchen, but we decided to sell as is as, we didn't know what the new owners would like and it seemed dumb to put the money in to create a new one only to get it ripped out again. We sold it with the kitchen price in mind and old neighbors tell me the first thing the new owners did was rip out the kitchen. This way they get what they want, and we didn't have to redo a kitchen.

I think the R word is probably on everyone's list, even your's Annie, but for some it's at the top, others have it as an important factors and even others have it pretty far down on the list. For younger homebuyers,It would be unwise not to consider resale if there is a possibility you are going to be moving in 5-10 years. If you are in your 40s and have a high mortgage payment, resale gives you an out if you need it or you might want to downsize when the kids are out of the nest. If you have most of your asset base in your home and are viewing it as an investment, resale should be important to you.

I expect for Annie and surely for me me and several others on the board, resale only comes in at the subconscience level. We don't think of resale much and and other considerations trump pure resale decisions most of the time. But it is still there subconsciously keeping us from doing something so inimical to future marketability that it would be stupid not to listen. Like Annie, we are preparing to build our forever retirement home and resale is only a minor factor. We'll probably pay all or most cash. I am sure that in the building process it will feel like we are spending everything, but we know we'll be able to afford what we are building and not sacrifice retirement savings. The likelihood of reselling is low and when the time comes I hope it will be our DD's problem not ours. We will try not to build a white elephant, and the HOA guidlines will force us to do some things that will be attractive to future buyers. But really whatever design decisions we make now may not appeal to the buyers in the 2040s and 50s anyway. For those who have reasonable intentions to stay in one place 20-30+ years, it is not what we do in the building process, but how we maintain the home over the year that will sell the home. Everything from 2014 will be dated by the time we sell whether or not we considered resale in the build, but if we've maintained it well, it will sell well.

This post was edited by mojomom on Sun, Aug 3, 14 at 9:56

Not worrying about resale is fine as long as there is no chance that a bank or your heirs will be stuck with an over mortgaged white elephant after you are gone.

Well, with the real estate market crisis, there certainly were many people with over mortgaged, over priced homes that were in line with resale trends that couldn't be sold, so that can happen to anyone at any time based on market conditions.

But my point was, given changing tastes over time, you can't predict what will be "in" and what will be a "white elephant" when you go to sell. My example of an open concept master bath was a case in point. How many "ugly bathrooms" or "ugly fireplaces" have you seen ripped out that were "to die for" when they were installed? So if you are building for resale, in addition to doing what may not be best for you at the time, you are putting money into something that the future homeowner may easily find a drawback, not a feature. (I remember when we bought our 50s ranch that the family had custom built, the woman said, "I found a picture of this fireplace when I was a teen and saved it all those years and we finally built it!" All I could think was, too bad you didn't lose the picture! I hated it!)

I just don't like to see people live with things that don't suit their needs just because some real estate agent says 'you gotta have it'. Real estate agents love the 'wow factor' as it makes there job easier. There are more than a few people who've bought a new house for that wow factor of stacked windows, soaring ceilings, great open spaces...and then they struggle with how do they sleep late in the a.m. because they can't cover those 2 story windows in their mbr...or they can't watch tv because of all the sunlight...or the noise upstairs is so loud from the rooms below, etc.

If you build for yourself, odds are you will find someone else who likes it too. If you build to be on trend, odds are those trends will change and you'll be dated by the time you go to sell.

It's your house, your money....don't let some real estate agent who's job is to "move the iron", not live there, design your custom home for you. That's my viewpoint...YMMV.

My point is that until your mortgage is paid off, it really isn't your custom home. And until the house is truly yours, you run the risk of leaving a mess to your bank or heirs. Trend items can ruin resale but so can unusual owner "upgrades" or out of the norm layouts or configurations.

If your custom home is built and paid for with your own money, more power to you. But, I don't think it is good form to encourage people to build whatever they like with other people's money. That is how the last financial mess started.

I disagree, deee. First of all the money is mine, not the heirs ...not until I die anyway. And when I die, whatever they get, they'll be better off than before. (Being of sound mind and body, I spent it all!). If the estate is in debt to the bank, then the bank bears the loss, not the heirs...or presumably the mortgage insurance does.

There are many reasons why the housing market went boom and bust, but people not building custom homes with resale in mind wasn't one of them. To the contrary, many homes were being flipped at the time with nothing but resale in mind, the faster the better. Over leveraging was a key factor, and that was true whether the house was custom or not.

The idea of worrying about whether my heirs will be able to easily sell my house is alien to me.

Deee, I think if people are really thinking about their own needs, and how they live, they are actually LESS likely to put in the more expensive "wish list" items. I'm sure if you're a gourmet cook, a restaurant style Wolfe range is something you would really like. But most people don't put that in because they want to use it. They put it in because it looks fancy and will impress visitors and future buyers.

It is wise to think about the real cost of things, too, though. I agree with you there. Too many people get the granite counters at a $5k premium over laminate because it's just a few bucks a month on the mortgage. No big deal. But if they had to actually write a $5k check, they'd be a little more careful. And that kind of thing DOES lead people into financial trouble.

But I don't think that it's not considering resale that makes people make crazy, over the top purchases.