Carpet Replacement?
Hello BPers,
I'm looking into purchasing a condo as a rental unit and it looks like interior improvements will be needed. The biggest being the terrible stained carpet. Does anyone have recommendations on replacement material (carpet vs. hardwood) and know how improvement estimates should impact a potential offer vs. the listed price? Thanks in advance for any comments.
Kevin
To answer your first question, I suppose everyone is different but IMO, I would avoid carpet like the plague. Especially if your intention is to buy and hold as a rental. Use a material that's easy to clean/maintain, has a longer life span overall, looks great no matter how much traffic it receives, a material that is classic/timeless rather than run the risk of today's trendy material becoming dated as styles change. Whatever replacement material you decide to go with it's gotta make sense from a competitive market standpoint, a product standpoint (product being the condo unit overall), etc., etc. Put another way, if the unit is a BMW (higher end) in a BMW/Mercedes type market..........you don't slap Chevy and Ford parts on it. And vice versa. If you're dealing with a Chevy unit in a Chevy and Ford market, you don't waste money on BMW/Mercedes parts. If your competition is using higher end materials then you should use materials that will allow you to compete favorably with your competition.
Thanks for the input, Kevin. It's to be rental so I'll certainly take your tip and avoid carpeting.
If the carpet is cleanable, we have it professionally cleaned, but that is the most money I am willing to put into carpet in a rental. We replaced worn out nasty carpet with laminate for one apartment and the two prospective tenants that looked at it loved it. We are doing the same to the apartment above the first one and will consider hardwood floors for our higher end apartments.
I am seeing more and more people looking for hard surface flooring- I even had one prospective tenant call and specifically ask about our apartments without carpet since she felt moving into a place with carpet was like wearing someone else's dirty laundry!