How your bathroom could make or break a sale

A badly positioned bathroom could be dragging down your home’s value by up to £20k or even stopping buyers from making offers

Everyone knows that modernised kitchens and bathrooms help sell properties – recent research showed that renovating these two rooms could add up to 10% to your home’s value.

But when it comes to bathrooms, location is everything. No matter how nice your fixtures and finishes are, if your wash space is poorly positioned it could actually deter buyers or cause them to make lower offers.

Top turn-offs

Properties with one bathroom accessed via the kitchen are a huge turn-off, according to a survey of 1,000 homeowners and buyers carried out for Mira Showers recently.

For homes with this layout, the research found that almost half of respondents would offer £7,000 less, while 18% would offer between £10,000 and £20,000 less. 

Meanwhile, for properties spread over more than one storey, 44% said they would not even consider homes where the only bathroom was on the ground floor.

These findings are in line with research carried out by Direct Line Insurance in 2018, when it surveyed 100 estate agents across the UK and concluded that a downstairs bathroom knocked 6% off the value of the average property.

Tom Greenacre from estate agent PurpleBricks, one of the experts consulted for Mira Showers’ research, said: “For all houses, regardless of property size, the bathroom would be best placed upstairs as this is what most buyers want and expect”.

Layout fixes

Considering a large number of older, terraced houses feature downstairs bathrooms, sometimes only accessible through the kitchen, many homeowners may have concerns when it comes to selling up, especially as experts are predicting a difficult time ahead for the UK housing market in 2020.

To make your home more attractive to a wider range of buyers, you could consider moving the bathroom upstairs.

Matt Herbert at Mira Showers said: “We discovered the youngest buyers (aged 16-24) are the most likely to renovate a property if the bathroom isn’t situated in their preferred place (48.05%).

"In fact, they’re over 10% more likely to do so than any other age group; only 37.41% of 25-34-year-olds (the next-closest age group) would plan to renovate rather than dismissing a property during their search.”

Or, you could add an additional bathroom and keep the downstairs wash space – one-third of the survey respondents said they would prefer a house with more bathrooms than a property with more bedrooms.

Those surveyed also said they would be willing to pay more for a property with an ensuite, in some areas significantly more than the asking price, as the table below shows.

Potential price increase for homes with ensuite bathrooms

Got the bathroom sorted? There's one more listing mistake that could turn off 82% of buyers.

Featured image: The Shutter Store