You Won’t Be Living There, So Don’t Design It For You

One problem that seems to arise more than almost any other when people try their hand at real estate development is a kind of tunnel vision. This happens when people buy a house with the intention of carrying out work on it, and decide that there is only one way to go with that work – they’re going to make the house irresistible to buyers. Having only their own opinion of what constitutes “irresistible” to go on, they make the mistake of designing the renovation to look like their own dream home.

We can all agree that it would be a fabulous thing to live in our dream home. But that is not what real estate development is about, sadly. How much would you like to live in someone else’s dream home, if you can’t choose who that person is? That is the choice you are presenting a potential buyer with when you develop a property according to your taste. The upshot of this is that you limit your profit margin. You cannot develop for your tastes, because you’re not selling to yourself.

If you are looking for wallpaper for your project, do not spend a lot of money on a certain design because you “saw it in the store and just had to have it”. The end result of what you are planning does not have anything to do with you “having” that wallpaper, so unfortunately you have to limit the individualism of the project. The key must always be the profit you can be confident of realising rather than one you might realize if you find a buyer who has all the same likes and dislikes as you do.