What Affects the Value of an Apartment?

It matters, but not in a straight line.

Upper floors are usually worth more for obvious reasons: better outlook, less noise, more privacy. But that assumes a lift that reliably works — in a building without a good one, a high floor becomes a liability rather than an advantage.

The ground floor is a special case: it can be discounted for privacy and noise, or lifted if it comes with a garden or its own entrance.

An open outlook adds real value. Facing the wall of the building a few metres away subtracts it.

Orientation matters too: natural light, and how warm the apartment runs in summer and winter, are things an occupant feels daily — and that shows up in demand.

Area is a number. Layout determines how much of that number is genuinely usable.

A well-arranged 140 sqm apartment can be more attractive than a 160 sqm one that loses its space to corridors and awkward corners. A buyer buys what they can actually use.

The gap between an apartment ready to move into and one needing substantial work is the cost of that work — plus something else: far fewer buyers are willing to take it on.

Almost every owner asks this. The answer is: not necessarily.

What determines how much of the spend converts into value:

• Quality of the work. A poor refit may add nothing.
• Age of the refit. A renovation done ten years ago is not a renovation.
• Fit with the market. Highly personal taste narrows the buyer pool rather than widening it.
• Condition of the building. A luxury refit in a run-down block recovers far less than the same work in a well-maintained one.

Age alone tells you little. A well-built, well-maintained thirty-year-old building can be better than a poorly built ten-year-old one.

What gets examined: structural condition, façades, the roof, water and electrical systems, and the state of the common parts.

In cities, parking is not a detail. Having it or not can make an appreciable difference to value, and visibly widens or narrows the pool of buyers.

How many lifts and in what condition, whether there is a generator and what it can carry, water tanks, security, and how well the building is managed. These shape daily life, and therefore demand.

A main road versus a quiet inner street. Proximity to a school, a place of worship, or a neighbourhood generator. A café under the window that runs until dawn.

None of this appears in a listing. All of it appears in an inspection.

A vacant apartment, an owner-occupied one, and one let under an old lease are three different values, because what a buyer can actually do with each differs.

Clean documents make a sale straightforward. Undivided shares, ownership never transferred after a death, or an unregularised building infringement all bear on value and on how many buyers will engage with the file at all.

An apartment's value is not its area multiplied by a district rate. It is the sum of factors, most of which show up in an inspection rather than in documents.

Residential valuation service