Photo by Parable Property

Let’s talk about property makeovers and exploring how they can significantly enhance the value of your HMOs and boost rents! Not everyone is willing to or able to invest six figures in a refurbishment… That kind of budget provides the scope to convert garages and attics, add an extension, go back to brick and invest in premium fixtures, fittings and finishes.

It’s much more difficult to genuinely add value and push rents up off the back of smaller HMO refurbishments. However, if you’re smart about how you spend your money and focus on the right things, you can still do this. Read below or listen to the full episode on The HMO Podcast about the intricacies of effectively increasing your property’s value without breaking the bank! 

We’ll be covering what you could with a refurbishment budget of £25,000 or less. Whether your property is already in prime condition, it doesn’t warrant a six-figure refurb, you’re working with a tight budget or you’re strategically navigating a fair market, here are 10 tips for refurbishing your properties on a budget, maximising every pound and transforming your HMOs!

1. Redecorate the property.

It never ceases to amaze me the impact of walking into a property after it’s just been redecorated. You can completely transform a space and make it look newer, bigger, more inviting and modern, which can really help with first impressions of tenants and valuers.

So, start by getting rid of any wood chip, glitter or anaglypta wallpaper. These sorts of textured wallpapers look old fashioned. They’re a nightmare to get off the walls, and you’ve got to be really careful because you never know what the wall behind it is like. 

If you’re not, you could end up having to replaster the walls and that’s where your budget can start to spiral. But try to get back to as close to a premium finish as you possibly can! Then start redecorating that property and really think about how you’ll do that. 

Spend time planning the pallet and the concept of the house. A good decorator is worth their weight in gold. Don’t cut too many corners and just go for the cheapest one. When it comes to redecorating, it’s all about the preparation, and it’s one of the areas where you should spend a lot of time on!

2. Improve the kitchen.

With a small refurbishment budget, we don’t have the money to completely rip out the kitchen and replace it. So, what can you do? If you can spray or vinyl wrap the kitchen and replace the worktops and tile splashback, the kitchen can look brand new. 

I’ve had incredible results with spraying and vinyl wrapping kitchens in our HMOs. This is great if you’ve got a kitchen that’s in reasonable nick, but it just looks a bit crap or it’s not working with your design concept. 

You’ll need specialists to do the spraying, but that’ll cost you around the region of £600 to £1,500. And if the fabric of the kitchen is in a good enough condition, then why pay to replace it? There are lots of cool options to make the kitchen look more modern. These are all cheap and cost-efficient ways of getting a premium look and adding that wow factor!

3. Modernise the bathrooms.

It’s trickier to do much on a low budget in bathrooms, but toilets, sinks and breast taps can often look old fashioned. If you have a cool design concept running through your HMO, the last thing you want is the bathrooms really dragging it down and looking completely out of place. 

So, it’s worth spending some money on updating the sanitary wear to more modern options. Ideally, you’ll do the same with the shower. I don’t think baths are great for HMOs as they often look dated and can be problematic. Because of that, I often rip them out and then install a long shower tray, a shower unit on the wall and a riser rail kit. 

Make the shower a walk-in enclosure and tile all the wet areas. I also replace the tile splashback behind the sink and take any tiling off the walls around the bath. You might need to do a bit of skimming in there. 

The biggest costs in bathroom refurbishments will likely be the labour and tiling. So, don’t go over the top on tiling the floor. Instead, I’d recommend getting a pretty cheap, off the roll vinyl flooring. Once you’ve done all the tiling and wet areas, you can then paint it. 

You’ll likely need a couple of new taps as well. Make sure the fixtures and fittings all go well together. But if you do all of that and you’re really smart, you can get an incredible look off a relatively small budget!

4. Replace the furniture.

How many properties have you been in and listings you’ve looked at where there’s mismatching furniture? There’s items that have just been left, and some bits have been replaced over the years, while others haven’t. And over time, it starts to look like a charity shop!

If it doesn’t look good, it won’t impress valuers or prospective tenants, and first impressions are everything. You won’t be able to push the rent up if you don’t have a cohesive look throughout the whole house.

Replacing all the furniture, getting it to match and making sure it’s cohesive and fits with your interior design scheme is really important. If you’re clever about this, you don’t have to spend an absolute fortune either.

Also, put as little furniture in the house as you possibly can so you don’t clutter the different spaces. It’ll feel bigger and make it look more premium, and it’ll also photograph better. And this can allow your property to really stand out and have that wow factor!

5. Incorporate feature walls and panelling.

Feature walls can completely transform a room and enhance the whole look and feel of a property. This can include using interior panelling or cinema walls, adding colours or incorporating special design features. 

I’d recommend focusing on the communal spaces, and typically the living room is the big one as it’s one of the first rooms anybody will see. You need to use durable materials because you’re going to get a lot of people and traffic moving through. 

But that is one of the ways to increase the property’s value and rent as much as possible. A good feature wall can cost less than £1,000, and it’ll help your property look better than 99% of homes! So, this can have a huge impact, and they often look absolutely fantastic online. 

You can still put feature walls in bedrooms as well but usually I limit that to colours. Sometimes we do three quarter height painted walls or half height and put some frames on the walls. You don’t need to go over the top in the bedrooms, especially if you have a smaller budget. 

6. Invest in feature lighting.

Add feature lightning to community areas, but use it sparingly as this can get expensive. If you start trying to add feature lighting into bedrooms and hallways, that’s a lot of wiring that has to be done. And if you want to retain a premium feature, that wiring has to be chased in behind the wall, and then that’s all got to be repaired and redecorated!

Rather than just having a single pendant in the living room with a bulb in it, do something interesting or buy a special type of pendant or interesting lighting. Consider using spotlights in a specific area of the kitchen.

If you’re going to do a feature wall, you can actually chase some of your electrical work for LED strips or other kinds of lighting behind there. While there are more people doing feature walls in the HMO space, very few are doing feature lighting! So, that is one of the areas where you can create that premium quality and really stand out.

7. Use vinyl graphics.

Getting new doors can be really experience, so where possible, I like to stick with whatever fire door I’ve already got. Paint the door, incorporate it into your interior design scheme and then take that a step further and put some vinyl graphics, door numbers or some cool features on the door. If you do it right, it can make a big difference and only costs about £150!

You’ll have to get the vinyl graphics drawn up and printed, and make sure they work with your whole design concept. They can be a bit of a faff to get on the door, so you’ve got to know what you’re doing when it comes to that.

8. Optimise extra space.

Make sure you’re using whatever space you’ve got as well as you possibly can. This is overlooked by a lot of investors. Often, we go into a property and we just envision it being used in the way that it’s presented to us! But sometimes you’ve got to get a little creative… 

One of the most important things that you can do, particularly if you’re on a small budget, is utilise things like alcove spaces. In an ideal world, we’d rip out awkward spaces like chimney breasts that actually get very messy and expensive. If you have a chimney breast in a living room, you could put a feature wall across it, build out the alcoves and then you could almost build it into a cinema space.

You could also use some shelves or a small storage rail and feature lighting to transform an otherwise pretty useless area in bedrooms. This can be a really cool space to take advantage of and tenants often really appreciate it.

Another good way that I’ve used awkward alcove spaces, particularly in kitchen-dining spaces, is I’ve put perching zones in. So, almost like a small breakfast bar with two stools, or a separate table and sofa. These areas can be super functional, and it can make that area more interesting.

This won’t drastically change the value of your HMO, but it could make your rooms more lettable and encourage tenants to stay for longer. And that could help you push your rents up over the long term!

9. Invest in new flooring.

Don’t try and get away with old carpets as they will stand out. Spend a couple of grand on some new flooring. To keep it affordable, I like to put a commercial grade laminate through the communal spaces downstairs and into the kitchen if possible.

Get the right style that goes with the fixtures, fittings and interior design concept. It’s usually easy to find some good deals on laminate flooring if you look carefully enough or plan in advance.

You can also recarpet the rest of the house with an underlay on a relatively low budget. I’d recommend going with a fairly neutral shade like a light grey or brown with a low pile.

You should be able to put new flooring down through an entire HMO for £2,500. If it’s a five bed-room or bigger, it may be a bit more, but you can create a really incredible first impression on a relatively small budget when it comes to flooring!

10. Improve the ironmonger in door furniture.

For me, this is a small and subtle change, but people notice when they grab an old, short door handle that’s uncomfortable on their hand. And we often notice when it’s a nice lever mechanism and it looks good. And actually, all the door furniture matching the cool features in the house really does matter!

You can get good prices on these as well, especially if you’re going to buy fire door hinges, handles and locks for the whole house. It doesn’t have to cost a fortune. The majority of the cost will be in the labour. Improving the ironmongery door furniture with nice modern fixtures and fittings is one of the things that you can absolutely utilise to your advantage. 

Concluding Thoughts

If you refurbish and update all of these areas in your properties, they will look brand new! And you can often do all these for a relatively small budget of under £25,000 for a five or six-bedroom HMO. You might not have the budget to do everything. If that’s the case, think about exactly what you can do and how far you can go with each area. 

Getting an element of everything in will allow you to stand the best possible chance of adding a significant amount of value and boosting the rent. As an absolute minimum, if you’re doing this the right way, you’ll get your refurbishment budget back in the valuation. And increasing the rents is where you can have the biggest impact!

If you have any questions about property makeovers and refurbishments, join us over in The HMO Community. It’s a great place to connect with me and find guidance and support from other experienced HMO investors. 

And if you want to learn more about refurbishments and interior design and have access to nearly 60 case studies, become a member of The HMO Roadmap today!

About the Author:

Andy Graham is the founder and the lead trainer at The HMO Roadmap! He is also the co-founder of The HMO Mastermind. He writes as a regular columnist in different magazines about a variety of HMO topics and is the host of The HMO Podcast! Follow Andy on Instagram!