Interior designers have great ideas to make your home look more expensive, while real estate professionals know how to make your home more appealing to homebuyers. You can take advantage of both worlds of experience to sell your home faster and for more money.

The best interior designs reflect the beauty and character of the home’s origins, whether you have a Tudor, Cape Cod, or contemporary home. Your interior design should be cohesive, intentional, and well edited from room to room. It may take some remodeling to both the exterior and interior to get the tasteful results you want, but it’s well worth it. 

To make your home look more expensive and appealing to homebuyers, consider the following:

• Conceal all wiring and cables in boxes, inside walls, and in crown moldings, wainscotting, and shoe moldings.
• Mix in elements like metal, ceramics, wood, and fabric to make each room’s décor more appealing.
• Hang drapes from the ceiling for an elegant, elongated look.
• Neutral décor in beige, white or gray is ideal, but to keep it interesting, add a lot of texture through rugs, fluffy bedding, pillows, and upholstery.
• Fine oil paintings and area rugs help provide focus points as well as pops of color. But take them with you on moving day!
• Update the electrical panel, increase the outlets, and upgrade switch plates.
• Replace carpet with hardwood floors, or affordable engineered wood.
• Arrange a vase of fresh flowers in the living area.
• Use apps for picture, light fixture, rug and drape placements.

If you think it’s crazy to spend half your income on a home and pay monthly utility bills in the hundreds of dollars, you should consider joining the “tiny house” movement. Whether you buy or rent a tiny home, according to thetinylife.com, it will give you much more financial freedom, independence, simplicity, and mobility than you could achieve with a typical 2,600-square-foot home.

A tiny home is generally 400 square feet or less, cutting your purchase, building, maintenance, and operating costs with a living space design to one-sixth or less of what you’d pay otherwise, not counting land purchase or rental fees. You have numerous options in lifestyles open to you. You can buy, design and build, or repurpose a vehicle or a building, such as a van, retired school bus, or a shed. You can also buy a trailer to move the home to other locations. Depending on local zoning laws, you could put a tiny home on a property that already has another home—an ideal situation for guests, aging parents, and boomerang adult children.

An added bonus is that tiny houses aren’t taxed the same as other properties for several reasons. If your tiny house is mobile, you pay vehicle taxes. If your tiny house is attached to a foundation, you’ll pay far fewer property taxes in Texas and many other areas. 

Contact your Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices network professional and local zoning authority to learn about tiny house options in your state.

According to Solar-estimate.org, costs can vary depending on the climate where you live, what your local electrical provider charges for service, the type of solar system you install, how many stories your home has, and whether your roof needs repair or replacement before solar installation begins, among other factors.

The national home electricity cost is about 14.96 cents per kilowatt hours (kWh) according to solar energy research. Home solar systems have a national average price of $2.95 per watt of installed capacity, a cost of about $17,700 for a 6-kW solar system that generates 9,000 kWh of energy. Federal energy tax deductions can reduce your expense by about $5,310 to a net cost of $12,390, or about $300 on every $1,000 that you spend. Solar panels can last 25 years or more, saving you an average of $1,346on annual energy bills.

You can choose solar panels or solar roof tiles to make your home more energy-efficient, but both are expensive. Are either worth the cost? That depends on numerous factors. CleanEnergyAuthority.com explains that while solar panels are an older technology, they can be installed on more existing roof types. Solar roofs are currently more expensive, but experts believe costs will decline in the next few years, and that they’re best employed in new construction or as a total roof replacement.

Last, solar panels or roof tiles can improve the value of your home with a few years of useful life left for the homebuyer.

In 2022, housing inventory dropped to its lowest since 1999, causing many homebuyers to become discouraged by rapidly rising prices and too much competition. By mid-year 2022, home prices began to moderate on rising mortgage interest rates. As the Federal Reserve continued to battle runaway inflation, homebuyers pulled back slightly, but so did home sellers who declined to sell high and buy another home at a much higher price and mortgage interest rate. New home construction lags demand by the millions, exacerbating housing shortages.

So, what’s changed? With mortgage interest rates that have risen to the point that 7% is “the new normal,” the housing market is reacting in surprising ways. Despite slower sales and lower prices throughout the first half of 2023, there are currently three offers for every home on the open market, according to Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of REALTORS^®, suggesting that homebuyers are shrugging off higher interest rates.

Housing market analyst Black Knight says that housing sales could be on the verge of a resurgence and that housing prices will move higher in certain regions. Year-over-year, home prices are down 0.1%, but the reheating of the housing market is already underway in 27 of the 50 largest markets at or above their previous home price peaks, say researchers.

Ask your Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices network professional to explain your local market conditions. Get prequalified for a mortgage loan so you can move quickly before home prices rise again before 2024. 

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