Selling guide
Add value to your property with these 2025 home trends
Predicted home trends for 2025.
Last updated: 7 November 2024
With only a few months left of 2024, at about this time, we all start to think about the New Year hurtling towards us from around the corner. This is particularly true in the world of real estate in Aotearoa, as the summer months are often among the busiest for property transactions,
If you’re looking to sell a home in NZ, this can be an especially busy period, as you start to get all your ducks in a row and bring the property to market. In a recent survey of would-be property sellers in Aotearoa, one of the most pressing questions respondents had was around valuing their property. Setting your property sale price is a hugely important decision, and we’ve already written some specific advice on how to approach this process.
But what if you’re looking to add value to your home before selling? Well, one of the best ways to do this is to make sure your property is nodding to property style trends. To help you do this, we’ve got our crystal balls out to predict what some of the most popular NZ home design trends might be in 2025.
Just remember, if you’re considering renovating in order to sell, you need to think carefully about whether you’ll get a return on your investment. In other words, will the amount you spend on the renovation pay off through a better house price? To do this calculation, consider what your home is currently worth, do some research on the value your prospective renovations add, and get some quotes for what they might cost.
Eco-friendliness continues to be a major property trend around the world.
NZ home design trends for 2025: our predictions
1. Greater emphasis on eco-friendliness
Around the world, people are looking for ways to improve the green credentials of their properties, and we predict that this will continue to be true of Kiwi in 2025. There are two notable benefits to a focus on sustainability in properties. Firstly, in the ongoing context of the climate crisis, making homes as eco-friendly as possible helps to reduce emissions and lower consumption of everything from fossil fuels to water. Linked to this are benefits to the owners’ wallets. If you’re using less gas, electricity and water thanks to your efficient home, you’ll end up saving on your bills.
If you’re thinking about making your home more eco-friendly before you sell, a few things you could think about include:
- Checking the water efficiency rating on your appliances: the New Zealand Water Efficiency Labelling Scheme (WELS) rating tells you how efficiently appliances like showers, toilets and washing machines are using water. If yours aren’t efficient, you could look to upgrade.
- Install solar panels: you’ve probably seen more and more NZ homes with solar panels on their roofs or in the gardens. Why not join them?
- Get double glazing: installing double glazed windows is an effective way to reduce energy wastage, and therefore minimise your overall consumption.
- Up your curtain game: similarly, thicker curtains tend to be better for retaining heat in your rooms, rather than allowing it to escape through your windows.
- Check on your insulation: if you can see ceiling joists inside your roof cavity, or if there are obvious gaps in your insulation, you need to get it topped up.
2. Enhancing your outdoor spaces
Now, we know we don’t need to lecture Kiwi about the benefits of a good deck or a souped-up BBQ set up. But, if you’re looking to upgrade your property before selling, you want to lavish some love on its exterior. In 2025, it looks like the emphasis is going to be on expanding the footprint of your outdoor spaces. A case where more really is more. Specifically, you could consider:
- Building out your deck
- Adding an outdoor kitchen or bar
- Building a fire pit
- Installing built in furniture
3. Emphasising the office
While, thankfully, the days of us all being forced to work from home are behind us, the home office most certainly isn’t. Many Kiwi still work-from-home multiple days a week, as well as a smaller group who are fully remote.
All of this means that the home office has become a necessity rather than a nice-to-have. As a result, we reckon that Kiwi hoping to sell a home in 2025 should be looking to make the most of their home offices, if they already have them, or showing how an alternative space could be converted to fulfil this function.
Among the ways you could look to improve your current home office set up when selling a home are:
- Streamlining your storage: this is particularly true if you don’t have a single room dedicated to being a home office, but rather you’re using a corner of, for example, a guest bedroom. Storage can be an issue in these circumstances, so you want to demonstrate that this space is up to the task.
- Picking the location: if you don’t already have a home office, consider which room you could show-off to buyers as a prospective place to work from home. Think particularly hard about natural light, noise levels and warmth.
- Showing some style: while a home office might feel like a functional space, you want it to be an appealing place to work, where would-be buyers could see themselves in. When staging your home office, opt for modern (and, ideally, ergonomic) features, rather than a chair that you’ve just dragged in from the kitchen.
A home office is a necessity for many home buyers.
4. Upgrade your bathroom and kitchen
Conventional wisdom is that your kitchen and bathrooms are among the most important rooms to upgrade when it comes to adding value to your property, and we reckon 2025 will be no different.
In both spaces, those eco-friendly appliances we’ve mentioned are likely to take on even greater importance in 2025.
For your bathroom, you might want to specifically think about:
- Freestanding tubs
- Adding more storage
- Spa-like features such as rainfall showers and heated floors
When it comes to kitchen renovations, 2025 trends are likely to include:
- Increased desire for smart appliances
- Modern kitchen countertops
- Custom cabinets
5. Smart home features
In 2025, the demand for smart features won’t be confined to the kitchen, as Kiwi continue to embrace the convenience and flexibility that these devices offer.
Like any pre-sale renovations, you need to carefully consider how much you’re willing to invest and whether this will result in a net profit benefit to the home when you sell it. This is particularly true when it comes to smart home appliances, which can be expensive and complex to install. But if you do the maths, and it looks like a solid potential return, you might want to look at:
- Automated thermostats
- App-controlled locks
- Voice-activated lighting
- Integrated energy monitoring system
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