Nobody's Building Room Additions Anymore
I used to build between three and five room additions
each year, but it's been over three years, since I worked on one. Why
aren't people adding on like they used to? There's still plenty of large
lots that homeowners can expand on, but why aren't they building the
room additions like they used to.
The biggest reason that most homeowners choose to move, before building
a room addition is taxes and building permit fees. How would you like to
build a room addition on your home, only to find out that your property
taxes have increased enough, to put you in a financial pinch?
I don't know what's worse, the amount of money that you're going to pay
in property taxes in the next few years, or all of the building fees
that you need to pay, before you can even build your room addition. It's
like they got you coming and going. You need to pay them before you
build and you need to pay them after you've built. It just doesn't seem
fair.
If you build a room addition larger than 500 square feet you can also
plan on paying additional fees for school taxes. Some of the other fees
attached to building permits can drive the price of the building permits
so high, that it doesn't make sense to ever do any improvements to your
home that would require a building permit.
That's about it for your taxes and building fees but there are other
problems. Building materials and labor prices continue to rise as fuel
prices, inflation and cost of living expenses also continue to increase.
The first room addition I ever built cost the homeowner $8,000. To build
that same room addition to day would probably cost $24,000 and up.
Hard to imagine, but I often wonder if room additions are going to be a
thing of the past.