When you consider the effect of wallpaper on your home’s worth, there are two types of value steps to weigh: What homebuyers see, and what appraisers see.

Style tastes will not factor into the appraisal. Provided that the underlying walls are in good shape, an appraiser is not going to reduce your appraised value dependent on the stripes on your bathroom walls or the border with spices and herbs in the kitchen.

Appraisers don’t value homes based on a seller’s style preferences, so your frilly sofa and yellow carpeting are safe in their ruling. However,”older wallpaper can make a house look and feel outdated. While this may not directly affect the value of the house, it might affect the marketability. Most buyers prefer to paint since it’s easier to change without a massive hassle. Buyers will pay less for dated homes.

Clean walls are a fantastic way for a buyer to look at your home as a clean slate. About 57 percent of high HomeLight agents urge that homeowners paint the inside before selling their houses. Painting the exterior independently has a 51 percent return on investment — not bad for a job that costs under $3,000.

Expect wallpaper to draw lower offers. Most of the time, wallpaper is something that the buyer looks at as something which dates the home, and they believe things that are obsolete to be fixes. In their mind, they are going, ka-ching, ka-ching, and taking numbers off. Nine times out of ten, they’re gonna subtract a good bit of money.”

Like it or not, that background you have lived with for years will impact your offers. Whether we reduce the price or not, the buyer will reduce their deal. That is the problem.

Unless they’re house-flippers or enthusiastic DIYers, most buyers aren’t looking for a project to take on once they are settled. They don’t want to devote their free time fixing up a house. The more you leave bare, the less buyers will probably offer, and they will typically lower the deal by more than it would have cost the homeowner to finish the job.

Before checking whether it’s possible to eliminate your wallpaper, it’s worth evaluating whether you should. Just as our experts recommend it, they also know that some homeowners don’t have the money or the know-how to eliminate it. It really does come down to the house and the unique situation of that house.