Working from home has become a normal way of life for many people around the country. In light of this, Benham and Reeves have conducted some research into how working from home is influencing UK home buyers and how having a home office can boost the value of your property.
As I write this, I am sat inside my home office, and until today, I hadn’t given too much thought to the potential value my personal working domain has added to my home or how important what I take for granted is to others.
To get a definitive answer, the estate agents Benham & Reeves looked into the number of homes listed for sale online in the London area that were under offer or sold with a home office.
Their investigations discovered that in London, more than a quarter of all the properties listed with an office had been snapped up.
Of the areas investigated, Bexley was the most popular place to buy a property with a home office with more than half of the listed properties either sold or under offer.
Other areas proving to be popular places to work from home were:
- Hillingdon
- Bromley
- Croydon
- Redbridge
- Ealing
- Havering
- Waltham Forest
- Haringey
- Richmond
All of these areas are on the periphery of London, which indicates that many buyers are doing there level best to avoid the stressful commute into London.
The cost of installing an office at your home
The simplest way to have an office at home is to repurpose an existing room. However, most people will probably not be able to do this. The other option is to build an office onto your home or have a separate building in your garden.
If you choose to build onto your property or create an additional room in your loft area, you’ll be looking at somewhere between £16,000-£21,000.
The insurance company Hiscox has suggested that extending your property via these routes could boost its value by an average of 8.4%.
The current average price of a house in London is £485,794, which means that such an extension could increase its value by more than £40,000.
As I mentioned earlier, there is another option, and this is to install an office in your garden. The main advantage of this is privacy and the ability to do your work without distractions.
Something relatively basic such as a cabin can cost as little as £4,000, but for a top-of-the-range garden office, in all honesty, the sky can be the limit. The slight downside to a garden office is they don’t add as much to the value of your property. This is because an extension to a property offers the potential for it to be repurposed and incorporated into the existing living area.
Therefore, if you are planning to install a home office, creating one via an extension makes better financial sense.
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