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It may not be a million-dollar question, but it is one worth at least a few thousand that you may want to ask yourself if you’re a homeowner: Is there anything in your kitchen that could potentially be bringing down your entire home’s value? I spoke to a few real estate pros to find out.
“I wish it were that easy to say this one thing is killing your home value … but that’s not the case,” says Coldwell Banker’s Ariel Baverman, one of Atlanta’s most accredited and top-producing Realtors. “But obviously, kitchens are one of the most important aspects of a home,” she says, noting they’re a key area of focus when it comes to determining a fair sale price for a property.
Unfortunately, as Lisa Graff, an award-winning real estate salesperson for Houlihan Lawrence, notes, the kitchen’s size and layout are the biggest factors affecting a home’s value, which are harder and pricier to change. Jen Barnett, broker and owner at The Front Agency, agrees that the features that are “directly detrimental to the overall comparable market value are larger problems in layout and design.” Of course, these issues can’t be easily or quickly fixed — but there are plenty of things affecting the home’s value that can.
The Features Decreasing Your Home’s Value, According to Real Estate Agents
While a pricey remodel isn’t usually something a homeowner can immediately rectify, nor should they have to — the good news is that there are some cosmetic improvements that are much easier fixes than a kitchen floor plan overhaul. Here’s what the experts said could be decreasing your home value:
1. Era-Specific Materials
One of the first questions Baverman asks when evaluating a kitchen is if it’s been updated recently, or within the last five to 10 years. This is often the median range where appliances and features are in good condition and not noticeably of a different era. Conversely, “fluorescent light fixtures, hunter orange laminate countertops, or avocado green linoleum flooring,” Barnett points out, clearly indicate that the kitchen is “significantly dated,” clearly harkening to the ’70s, which “could make the home less desirable in the eyes of buyers.”
Countertop materials are often dead giveaways that the kitchen hasn’t gotten enough TLC from its owners, and that’s not limited to just laminate material. “Tiled or busy countertops, particularly in darker granite, are undesirable, as they can be expensive to replace, especially if there’s an island to consider,” Graff says. “People want more harmonious, quieter kitchens, or a bold color with veining that packs a punch for a luxurious, elevated feel. Busy granite feels tired and dated.”
Although appliances aren’t part of the structural bones of a kitchen, many house hunters will fixate on them and let these big-ticket items sway their buying decision. Baverman often asks and lists the age of the appliances if it’s favorable. Graff notes that color choice is often a good immediate indicator.
“Generally, black appliances are out,” Graff says of kitchens in 2025. “White appliances — unless it’s an all-white kitchen — can also give an outdated feel. Harvest gold stoves are out. Older burners on islands with fans overhead have to go as well, as they divide a kitchen and are awkward.”
She places room-dividing exhaust as the same kind of faux pas as cabinets above an island, as they both “obstruct sight lines and make a kitchen feel claustrophobic,” which is the last thing someone toiling in the home’s biggest workhorse of a room wants to feel. Barnett agrees, adding that “kitchens that are cramped for space and only comfortably allow one person working at a time tend to isolate the cook.”
“This may be unrelated to value, but one of my pet peeves is when there are too many different floors from one viewpoint, especially if they clash,” says Baverman, who recommends having no more than three types of flooring visible at a time. Mixing up different floor types and patterns can seem slapdash, hint at piecemeal repairs (and bigger problems), and also make spaces feel both disjointed and smaller, she adds.
While Baverman advises stone, wood, and tile as optimal kitchen flooring materials, Graff says that for the latter, grout color is also very important: “Lighter colored flooring with dark grout can appear dirty.” Additionally, “Other things that give ‘ick factor’ are cracked floor tiles. No one wants to inherit a seller’s problems and have to replace floor tiles right off the bat!” While that may sound like a larger project, if you have the original tile on hand, it’s often relatively inexpensive to have a professional tiler replace only a few at a time without having to redo the floors.
Leave any of these features as-is, and you risk them coming up at the negotiation table as a reason for a discount on the list price, bringing down your home’s overall value. But if you’re not looking to sell anytime soon and you love your space, enjoy it, because you’re the only one who matters!
What do you think about these value-decreasing factors? Let us know in the comments below!
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Su-Jit Lin
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