Giving an apartment a "face-lift"

[bumclouds]

We've all seen those home improvement shows where people give their houses a fresh lick of paint and try to sell it for more.

Has anyone on this forum ever done it before (in Taiwan)?

When I was a kid in Australia I remember "helping" my auntie by painting the wall with a tiny paintbrush and getting in the way of people doing heavy lifting. She made a lot of money for someone in her late 20's.

[headhonchoII]

I think what generally happens in Taiwan is that people build new or second hand houses and often immediately rip it apart and rebuild according to their own requirements and tastes or else they specify what they want at the start when buying an unbuilt apartment. For business people the favourite approach is to buy a dilipidated apartment or one unsuitable for family life (e.g. situated over a temple) and then turn it into multiple taofang (studio apartments). They usually hold onto the apartment in this case and rent it out though, first it was to students and singles and now to tourists.
It was common in Taiwan's last property boom in the 90s to do what you said but I just think things are different now.
Many old gongyu will eventually be demolished and built into high rises and that's another factor to consider.

[finley]

What HH said, although I imagine it's still possible to do if you choose your location wisely, find a building that's still structurally sound (not easy to ascertain!), and do some of it yourself. It ain't cheap if you call in the "experts". I knew someone who got a team in to do a complete makeover (the flat was about 20 ping in an oldish 5-storey building). IIRC it cost about NT$700000, and that was purely for a cosmetic makeover - cheap 木心板 stuff, lots of energy-sucking halogen spots, you know the sort of thing. Looked nice, but it would want ripping out again in <10 years, and I doubt you'd realise a massive profit if you were fixing up just to sell.

[Icon]

Basic paint job with new floor -cheapest ceramic- goes for 150K. New doors say 50K, add some pipes and electrics -again, on the cheapest side, and you'll have 100K easily. Fixtures make a statement, say 2K each. You can easily put up to a million in renovations if you do closets and other storage areas.

The money is in buying an old apartment in a well located area and dividing the rooms into taofangs/rooms and rent separately.

[bumclouds]

Basic paint job with new floor -cheapest ceramic- goes for 150K. New doors say 50K, add some pipes and electrics -again, on the cheapest side, and you'll have 100K easily. Fixtures make a statement, say 2K each.

I was thinking more a bunch of small one-bedroom studio apartments. Would it really cost 150K to re-do the walls and floor in a pokey little student apartment?

[Icon]

Basic paint job with new floor -cheapest ceramic- goes for 150K. New doors say 50K, add some pipes and electrics -again, on the cheapest side, and you'll have 100K easily. Fixtures make a statement, say 2K each.

I was thinking more a bunch of small one-bedroom studio apartments. Would it really cost 150K to re-do the walls and floor in a pokey little student apartment?

No, that is not redoing walls. That is just basic paint job and cheap ceramic tile flooring for let's say about 20 ping. You can get many quotations, I'm throwing here a ballpark figure based on my 6 quotations for my own place -23 ping.

[*monkey*]

yeah, there is no concept of fixing up a place to sell here. You fix up a place to live in or rent out. When the value of an apartment is calculated by banks for appraisal purposes, they only take into account the location and size of the property. What it contains is not relevant. You might get a small bump in resale price if you leave something the new owner wants (a pristine wooden floor, for example) but that is usually negotiated in addition to the real estate value.

All wood (even finger-jointed lengths, plywood, particleboard etc) is expensive in Taiwan. For that 700,000 Finley mentioned (which is about right), about half that cost is going to be for wooden raw materials.