Rock the Block Winner Jasmine Roth Shares Her Top Tips for Adding Home Value
The only difference between Jasmine Roth's real life—which includes running Built Custom Homes, her California-based design-build firm, and filming episodes of HGTV's Hidden Potential, in which she tricks out spec houses—and her life on HGTV's smash hit series Rock the Block is that the latter was, well, a competition. "It changed everything. The stakes were a lot higher," says the Huntington Beach native, who duked it out against three other competitors to create the highest-value house on the block.
And guess what? She won the whole season when the house she designed was valued at $1,020,000, the highest of the bunch. To be fair, Roth's experience pretty perfectly aligned with the task at hand, so we reached out to get her tips on designing a home with great resale value right at the outset.
Give every room a specific function.
"Before I do anything, I think about how the spaces are going to function," says Roth. "It's not going in and knocking down walls, it's sitting down and being like okay, most people in this neighborhood have dogs and kids, how is that going to look in this space?" Doing so right at the outset, before you buy any furniture, will help you avoid ending up with a room that looks perfectly lovely but never gets used. "We call those dead spaces," Roth says.
Invest in bedrooms and bathrooms.
When shopping for a home, you'd automatically consider paying more for a house with more bedrooms and bathrooms—both en-suite and powder rooms—so maxing out both is a good idea for your resale value. The trick, Roth says, is to keep the footprint of the house in mind (you want as many full-sized ones as possible, not one room sliced into three dorm-style bedrooms). "That's where I start with my budget: I say, how many reasonably-sized bedrooms and bathrooms can we add? Once I have that cost, I take whatever is left and disperse it around the rest of the house."
Don't overspend in the kitchen.
"It's literally where you spend the most time, the hub and heart of the home, and also one of the easiest places to do small things that make a big impact," says Roth. On Rock the Block, "I knew I didn't have enough money to put in a brand-new, top-of-the-line test kitchen," she says. So she kept the spec home's existing countertops and cabinets, simply painting the latter and adding an inexpensive tile backsplash to give the room a fresh feel.
Consider every inch of the lot.
You know what spaces many designers overlook? The front and back lawns. "If you can max out that whole space, your living area can feel so much bigger—and you're already buying that land!" says Roth. She did the same in the garage, where the home had a funky little wall niche that was going unused. "In my garage, living in Southern California, we have tons of hobbies and so much stuff," she explains. I want to put my car in the garage but also my snowboard!" So into the niche went a set of climbing grips and a mountain wall mural, plus a big mirror and that fancy flooring for yoga sessions.
Do whatever work you can yourself.
Easier to say if you have a few hit design TV shows, but if you're even remotely handy this is good advice since labor can be very expensive. Roth spent three days on the show installing commercial-grade epoxy on the garage floor, because she knew it was high up on the appraiser's list. "I didn't have the money to pay some one to do it, but I think it was worth it. It took what was just a run-of-the-mill garage and made it look really finished."
Appeal to a buyer's emotions.
One part of selling a house is getting it appraised, but another is making look cozy and wonderful so a buyer can picture themselves there. "I brought in all kinds of custom art, and staged all the rooms, to try and appeal to the human that is going to walk in that house and live there," says Roth. Three bedrooms have to look like real bedrooms if you're going to convince someone they can use them that way.
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