Selling a Sydney home, moving to a new one and slapping on a stamp duty bill, for so many homeowners across the city, it just doesn’t add up. The numbers never seem to work out in your favour. The gap between what you’ve got now and what you’re after has grown so wide that giving your current place a makeover, i.e., renovating instead of moving house, is no longer just a consolation prize; it’s a genuine financial strategy. And building companies in Sydney are starting to notice. Enquiries about renovations are flooding in and the projects are getting wilder and wilder.
The NSW Department of Planning’s 2025 Sydney Housing Supply Forecast sounds a rather grim warning: by June 2029, just 161,687 new homes are expected to be finished in Greater Sydney, still a far cry from the 263,000 the National Housing Accord is calling for in the same time frame. With all that new supply stuck in the pipes and demand just as high as ever, many parts of Sydney are basically left with one option: get renovation builders Sydney to renovate what you’ve already got if you want any extra space.
Just What Are Sydney Renovation Builders Doing with Their Time
The types of projects driving the Sydney renovation market are a familiar story. Kitchens and bathrooms are still the most popular on the volume front. But more and more often, homeowners are asking builders to tear out the dividing walls between kitchens, living rooms and dining rooms, i.e., knock down those dividing walls and create that perfect open-plan living space. And then there are the second-storey additions where people are trying to squeeze in multi-generational living without having to put their house on the market. But scratch the surface and you start to find some rather more dodgy issues at play, like all those pre-1987 homes which contain asbestos in the walls and floors, the dodgy structural framing, leaky pipes and wiring that’ll need replacing before you can even start thinking about doing a modern renovation. Experienced builders factor this stuff in, the amateur ones don’t, and guess who ends up footing the bill, the homeowner!
The Arithmetic of Renovating vs Selling Up
This renovation vs moving calculation all comes down to your project budget, how much your property will be worth afterwards and what you can actually get for your money if you do decide to sell. A simple kitchen reno in the inner suburbs, done to a half-decent standard, will give you back between 60% and 80% of what you spent in property value. And as for the bathroom reno, same again. But let’s be real, the real benefit of all this is the quality of life boost, a decade more in a house that finally works for your family compared to selling and going through all the hassle and expense of buying a new place. That all sounds fair and dandy, but only if you don’t get stung on the renovation costs. The thing is, construction costs in Sydney have just gone through the roof since 2021 and they’re still stuck there. So what cost $35,000 five years ago might now cost you a whole lot more, something like $50,000 to $60,000 for the same project. And then there are your contingency budgets, the 15% to 20% added on top of the initial quote to cover all the scope changes and hidden defects that tend to crop up once work starts on a renovation project, not a sign of doom and gloom, but just a sign that Sydney renovation projects are complicated business.
Questions You Should Ask a Renovator Before Making an Agreement
Quality of a renovator is impossible to see in the quote and the web portfolio of the firm. Assessment of the company is possible only through a direct question-and-answer process:
- Specifically ask the person about the experience with your kind of house, its age and your suburb.
- Ask the contact information of recent customers and ring them, don’t just read testimonials.
- Ask about the management of subcontractor scheduling and what will happen if the trade will be delayed.
- Verify the NSW Fair Trading contractor licence number of the builder and find out whether the licence exists in the register.
- Find out whether the building project needs coverage by the Home Building Compensation Fund and whether the builder has it.
How Project Management Makes the Difference?
An average kitchen or bathroom renovation project in Sydney means the involvement of at least five or six licensed trades in the following order: plumber, electrician, tiler, plasterer, painter and the carpentry of the builder. Coordination of these trades in order to arrange so that they come to work once the previous job is done and all necessary materials are ready is the capability of the renovators. Delays of one of these trades affect the whole schedule inevitably. The renovator managing subcontractors directly rather than putting this responsibility back on the owner of the house provides a totally different level of service.
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