How the sale value of your des res can go up in smoke

How the sale value of your des res can go up in smoke

If you want to sell your house for a decent price, throw out the gnomes, give up the fags, shoot the dog and fill in the swimming pool.

And chuck out that avocado bathroom suite which looked lovely in 1982 but could knock as much as £8,000 off the value of your deceptively spacious des res.

This ruthless advice is offered by a new television programme, the latest in a long line determined to turn homeowners into money-mad maniacs with an excess of dodgy garden decking.

According to presenters Colin McAllister and Justin Ryan, having all 20 blunders to be listed on Sunday's broadcast of The 20 Quickest Ways To Lose Money On Your Property could reduce the asking price by £256,500.

Which could be a problem in London (average house price £250,000) and a disaster in more distant regions where the average has yet to reach £100,000.

The gnomes, especially when partnered with stone cladding, could cost you £15,000; cigarette smoke could account for another £16,000 and smelly pets for £10,000.

The swimming pool, far from being seen as an asset during the typical one-day British summer, is a £15,000 liability when it comes to selling, presumably because of the need to maintain it and retrieve dead frogs and autumn leaves from the deep end.

Other costly features include nasty extensions (£20,000), icing sugar ceilings (£14,000), plastic windows (£12,500) and your less than.....continued below

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Handy Andy attempts at DIY (£10,000).

Neighbours from hell could lose you £7,500 and a toilet in the wrong place would be both inconvenient and a £6,000 liability.

The worst and most expensive (£100,000) thing you can do is to paper over the cracks and ignore structural problems, especially subsidence, which can cause your personal value to sink along with your foundations.

The list was taken with a pragmatic pinch of salt by Matthew Clark, manager of estate agents Gascoigne Halman in Bramhall, an affluent Manchester suburb with high property price tags (and some difficult pockets of subsidence).

"There is certainly a price premium on a nice house with neutral walls, cream car pets, white bathroom, good kitchen," he said. "But with the market as it is at present, there is such a shortage of houses that people will not be very easily put off from buying - even if there is an avocado bathroom suite."

He recently shifted a house with a swimming pool and will not hang back from bluntly advising clients that some aspect of their home, whether daft gnomes or hamsters in need of deodorants, needs to be dealt with.

"I will normally tell people that we will take it to market. But if a problem keeps stopping a sale, something will have to be done.

"We had a house in which the lounge had been extended and painted a really dark red. It was like a tunnel. Every comment we had from potential buyers was about how dark the room was.

"In the end, I told them to bring in a decorator and paint the walls cream. Within a week and a half of the room being painted, we must have had four or five offers."

But leave your laminate floors (which Sunday's programme claims could cost you £2,000) where they are: Mr Clark will not hear a word against them.

Top 20 loss makers in the home

Problems in selling (sale price loss in brackets):