Boost your property's value by £20,000

House prices are dictated by far more than the property itself. John Fitzsimons looks at the factors that play the biggest part in deciding how much your home is worth.

I know it's a bit of a cliché, but location really is a huge factor in just how much your property is likely to fetch. It may not be the be all and end all, but it plays a massive part.

My Father is an estate agent in a pretty well-heeled area of London, and I'm constantly amazed by just how much some pretty ordinary properties manage to fetch, based simply on their postcode.

Research from Nationwide Building Society last month confirmed just how significant location can be in your property's value - particularly if you are near a good school.

Good local primary? Add £20k!

It seems almost a ridiculous amount, but if you live near a top-performing primary school (ie, one which had a 100% attainment rate in the recent SAT exams), your property could command a premium of almost £20,000 compared to an identical property near a school in the bottom 25% of results.

That's one hell of a difference, based on the exam results of 11 year-old children, but even schools which are simply good rather than exceptional can have a serious impact on your home's worth. Across England, a 10% increase in the SATs pass rate at a local school equates to an average increase in house price of £5,860.

In London, such a rise is even more pronounced, adding an average of a massive £8,031.

So clearly, if you fancy adding a small fortune to the value of your home, making sure it is near a cracking primary school is a good start!

Related how-to guide

Sell your home

If you want to obtain the best possible price when selling your home, then these ideas should help.

See the guide

Gain rooms!

This is a simple one, but it can come back to haunt you. It stands to reason that a four-bedroom house will typically cost more than a three-bedroom house.

The trouble is, the extra room only really makes a difference if it is actually useable. So while it might seem a great idea to convert a tiny box room into a bedroom, so you can market your property as having an extra bedroom, when the time comes to show people around, they are unlikely to be too impressed.

If you do it properly though, it can make a hell of a difference. Research, again by Nationwide, found that adding a new 13 square metre bedroom to a property could add between 11% and 13% to its value.

On a property that had cost £150,000, that's an extra £16,500-£19,500.

Keeping warm

Just 9% of homes in the UK currently don't have central heating. As a result, if your property is one of those few that don't, it could scratch anything from 8% (London properties) to 13% (Wales) from your home's worth.

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On a property that would be worth £150,000 with central heating, that's the equivalent of between £12,000 and £19,500.

So if you want to maximise your property's value, make sure you have full central heating!

Home improvements

Another classic measure to add value to your home is to go for some home improvements, things like adding an extension or perhaps redecorating.

However, you have to be really careful with such improvements as they may end up costing more than you add to your property's value - a piece of research by Abbey last year highlighted that thanks to declining house prices, improvements that previously would have resulted in a big boost to the property's value may now cost more than they add.

If you want to add value to your home via some sort of improvement, the best thing to do is probably to pick the brains of a local estate agent. I'd also recommend following the terrific tips in our goal: Make home improvements.

Your neighbours

Brits can get a bit wound up by house prices, particularly when it comes to finding out how much their neighbours paid for the property next to their own, or finding out how much that property has been valued at should the neighbour look to move on.

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But the people you live amongst can also have a big impact on the valuation of your home.

Even just being untidy makes a difference - a study by LV= this year found that more than 44% of Brits leave near to a dilapidated home, which can knock up to 10% off the value of your home. And if you have particularly noisy neighbours, perhaps playing really loud music, it can whack your property's value by up to a massive £18,000!

Read Sell your home like a Norwegian and make thousands to find out how our Scandanavian neighbours add thousands to the price of their property.

Keeping it regional

Of course, while all these other factors play a decent part in how much your property is going to fetch, it's location regionally is probably the most important. You can have an identical property, with identical neighbours in London and Southampton, but it's odds on the London property will cost more.

Using the Land Registry's house price index I've out together the following table to show how the average price of various properties alter dramatically depending on where you are in the UK.

Figures correct for October 2009.

Get help from lovemoney.com

If you want to maximise your property's worth, then there are lots of ways in which lovemoney.com can help.

If you are about to put your house on the market, be sure to follow the hints and tips in our goal: Sell your home

You might also like to check out this video: The estate agent debate

And finally, if you have some house price related questions that need answering, why not head over to our Q&A section and see if your fellow lovemoney.com readers can help?

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