Small, visible, at the kerb
A new garage door or steel front door returns roughly double what it costs. A minor kitchen refresh — fronts, counters, hardware, no walls moved — returns about all of it. These are the only jobs that reliably make money.
We would rather show you what the houses that sold near you actually did, and what it returned.
Live permit activity: who is mid-flip, who stalled, who just finished - and what the numbers did afterwards.
Properties with live permit activity: mid-flip, stalled, just-renovated, teardown. Tells a seller what their renovated neighbours actually did.
See what pays
Paint, light and landscaping return more per dollar than a kitchen almost everywhere. The exception is a defect a buyer's inspector will find anyway - that one is not optional, it is just a question of who pays and when.
If you renovate without permits before selling, you have not added value on paper - you have added a question at inspection. Pull the permit even when it is slower.
Every job is two things: materials and labour. The materials stay in the house — the cabinets, the tile, the windows are still there on closing day and a buyer is paying for them. The labour leaves with the person who did the work. You paid for it; it is not in the house any more.
On the big remodels people actually mean when they say ‘renovate’, assume roughly forty to sixty cents of every dollar comes back at closing. It is a planning number, not a promise, and it is why ‘we will make it back on the sale’ is usually wrong.
From the national study that has priced the same twenty-plus projects against real resale values for over twenty years — the 2025 edition. National figures; your street can differ, and Renovation Radar shows what your street actually did.
A new garage door or steel front door returns roughly double what it costs. A minor kitchen refresh — fronts, counters, hardware, no walls moved — returns about all of it. These are the only jobs that reliably make money.
New siding and a simple wood deck come back at roughly ninety cents to a dollar. Worth doing when the old one is a problem a buyer will see — not as an investment.
A full bath remodel returns about eighty cents; a new roof or new windows about seventy; a major kitchen fifty to sixty; a primary-suite addition as little as twenty. Do them to live in — not to sell.
Impact windows look like a seventy-cent job in the national table, but in South Florida they also cut the wind part of an insurance bill by a third or more — every opening must be protected to qualify. Count the premium saving before you call them a loss.
A roof is the other Florida special case: past about fifteen years old, insurers start pricing it — or refusing it — regardless of what it returns at resale. Sometimes the seventy-cent job is what keeps the deal insurable at all.
The work changes the number, so redo the number.