Would you pay more for a house with higher ceilings? I probably would, but I guess it depends. The ceilings in my home are a standard 8 ft. Would I have paid more if they were 9 ft? Probably. But what about 23 ft? No, that would be too high.
Someone asked me a question recently about the value difference of ceiling height, and I thought kicking around some ideas here could open up a great discussion. Anything else you’d like to add? I’d love to hear your take.
Question: What is the difference in value for ceiling height? For instance, 8ft to 9 ft, 9ft to 10ft, etc?
Answer: That’s a great question. On one hand higher ceilings are a more custom feature, so buyers are likely to pay more for them. This is particularly true for single story homes. However, there isn’t some sort of ceiling height market formula we can apply to every property because real estate adjustments are frankly going to be different depending on the neighborhood, price range, and market. We often hope to extract the value of one particular feature, but let’s remember many times buyers are actually looking at the entire package of a home instead of parsing individual features. In reality ceiling height is only one part of the package when it comes to buying a home. For instance, 10 ft ceilings sound like an asset, but if they’re found in a home with a terrible layout, they might not command a premium at all. So just because they are there does not make them inherently valuable. This underscores the importance of using an “apples to apples” approach when selecting comps, meaning the goal is to compare the subject property with homes that are overall similar so we get a sense what the market has been willing to pay for such homes. We might not find homes that are exactly the same, but that’s okay because we can use homes that are deemed overall competitive. Thus as an appraiser, rather than isolating my search for comps to just ceiling height, I would simply try to find other homes that represent a realistic comparison. If an Excel Jedi wanted to geek out and crunch numbers to try to prove a value difference, maybe that could be done with extensive research (sort of like Jonathan Miller measuring value by floor location in New York). But keep in mind how difficult that would be since ceiling height levels are not recorded in MLS or Tax Records (in Sacramento at least). Most of all though, buyers don’t bring measuring tapes to properties, which reminds us to think in terms of the total package.
Questions: How would you answer the question if someone asked you? Anything else you would add? What did I miss?
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