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5 Renovations That Are A Waste Of Money in a Rental Property

Kris Krohn here with Limitless wealth TV and today, I’m talking about the five renovations that are a total waste of money. Alright, we are back and today, we are talking about five renovations you just hands down shouldn’t do. I want to do a little shout out to my buddy Clayton Morris with this channel, Morris Invest, he’s giving you three great ideas that I think we want to cover first and then we’re going to throw two bonuses on top of it. – Absolutely. The first idea, the first thing that you don’t ever want to do is to switch out your kitchen countertops. Look, now I know, everyone says, “Hey, but I want that hard stone, I want the granite or the marble or the whatever” it just trust me, this is one of those things where you will never recuperate your money. – You know because when you’re dealing with single-family homes, for example, real estate below the median, this is what basic average everyday Americans are trying to get into and so you know when you’re talking about those basic level homes, they’re not looking for granite so you got to make sure that you take off your goggles, your consumer goggles and you put on your investor goggles and you think what’s best for the investment as opposed to what’s best for what I would want because you’re not going to live here, this is an investment property. – Absolutely. Second one, bedrooms. Don’t combine or remove a bedroom, okay. This is important because so often, when we’re getting into homes, single-family residences, we’re talking about here, you want to make sure that you have the right amount of bedrooms for the right amount of square footage and combining that to make one big bedroom that means you lose out on a bedroom and although you may like that, chances are, the rest of the world that’s wanting to buy your home isn’t going to want that. – It’s just a lot of extra money to put into the house as well and more money always means more time. I will tell you however, I did, I have had success in adding an extra bedroom, I only look at doing that however when you only have two bedrooms in a house. Going from a 2 to a 3 bedroom and you’ll get less of a value going from 3 to 4 over 4, who cares, but if you’re just sitting at 2, there’s a world of a difference that you can make in the price of the home by going from number 2 to number 3 but that’s not all I’d say on that. – Absolutely. The third thing from Morris invest what he says is, bathrooms. Don’t overdo the bathroom. – Steven, I need heated tile. I need tile floor to ceiling, I need on the ceiling. I need a sauna right over the toilet for some reason that I understand, and a bidet. – How do you do that? – I don’t get the bidet thing – Well I know plenty of people that love that but again, that is.. – You do? – Well I know one person that lives and dies by a bidet. – Is it you? – No, it’s not me. No. But the thing is, all those are small, not small, all those are upgrades that are very specific, they’re very specific to a person’s taste, any time when you’re doing an upgrade where you feel like this is something that I would just love or you know that, someone specific may love a specific situation. Just stay away from it. You want to stay vanilla, you want to stay broad, you want to appeal to the very most people and again, we’re talking about these investment-grade real estate properties, we’re talking about 97% of the populace, not the 3% who liked the gold fixtures and the huge upgrades and the granite this and that, you know, everything like that. – So you know, this brings us to number four that we’re adding to the table today.We want to talk about flooring. Now we’re right now standing on, this is acacia flooring. I remember I was in Africa when I saw acacia tress and I’m like, well I can see why that’s probably really expensive to get here, acacia is a fine wood on the hardness scale, I think it’s like a nine out of ten, it’s very hard to get and it’s very expensive. The reality is when you’re dealing with an investment property, you don’t need acacia flooring, you don’t need walnut, you don’t need Brazilian, you don’t need a hand scraped. What you need is really basic flooring and often, you’re going to get your basic laminate, that’s going to do the job, they’ve got the stickers that you can put down, very basic and elemental carpet that you can put down and if you’re going to put down a hard surface like a tile, then stick with the really cheap tile, – They don’t need travertine, right? – Well, people always has a special under 70¢ or their 99¢ tile pieces, go get a little pallet of that if you want to take the extra time and effort and energy and do that but you know what? Linoleum and carpet, they go down a whole lot faster. If you’re going to do tile, stay away from the two three and four and five dollar or a foot stuff and stick with the basic dollar of this stuff. – Completely agree. Now the fifth thing, the fifth thing that you don’t want to necessarily get crazy on is cabinets. Now cabinets are found all throughout the house, you’ve got your kitchen cabinets, you’ve got your bathroom cabinets, you’ve got maybe your office cabinetry, right. Cabinets are one things that could one of those things that can cost you an arm and a leg, – It costs a lot of money. – It can take away all of your profits in a real estate investment property so before you go and you start yanking cabinets out of the walls and get all excited about how it’s going to look, just do yourself a favor, ask yourself these questions, can I resurface these things? Can I sand and repaint these cabinets? Is there something else that I can do? Can I reuse some cabinets from an old project into this project maybe? Any kind of, anywhere where you can reuse, fix up, repaint, that’s going to really stretch your dollar in the end. – And this is what you want to write down, lacquer, right. I mean, get a nice lacquer finish, a nice oil-based paint, get the sprayer and put a nice thin coat of that, go all white or something basic like that and you can take hideous-looking cabinets, please remove the fixtures first right, the handles and then just give it a nice paint down and then go ahead and add them again and you know what? They may not look entirely new but they’re going to look ten times better and they’re going to save you thousands of dollars of redoing cabinets.- Absolutely. – Alright, so these are five of our hacks that we wanted to add to the table today on this idea of, what should you not be renovating that are going to cost you an arm and a leg and too much and ultimately take your profitability in a project and shrink it down to put you at risk. So don’t do that as an investor. I think Steven said it best when it came down to your goggles, make sure you are wearing your investor goggles, you got to be looking at the project a little bit more from a distance instead of what you would per say want and do something that works for what the average price of that home is in the area and what’s appropriate for that home in that area. If you have some experience in real estate and have other ideas that you also think are a waste of time, please comment below and share them with the rest of our youtube friends so that we can help each other making sure that we’re making wise decisions in our renovation game. Make sure that you subscribe, hit the bell on your way out and look back tomorrow, I’ve got a new video coming for you.