Increase Home Value with Faster Broadband

Does Faster Broadband Mean Your Home Is Worth More?

19:50 26 July 2017

Faster broadband increasing the value of your property may seem like a rather odd premise, however there is data that suggests that properties with access to high speed broadband are easier to sell and rent than those who do no not.

 

A 2016 survey showed that 22% of home buyers would negotiate a lower price purely because the broadband speeds available at the property were not up to scratch and an astounding 71% would reject an otherwise ideal property did not offer broadband which met their minimum requirements.

 

An interesting stat here is that the average minimum requirement for house buyers is 50MB (way above the UK average of 29MB) due to buyers wanting to ensure they future proof their broadband speeds as much as possible when making a long term commitment in buying a home.

 

The London School Of Economics used 15 years of house sale data to correlate the relationship between an increase in broadband speeds and house prices. This showed that on average house prices increased by 3% when broadband speeds doubled, whereas a report in 2014 showed that slow broadband can knock as much as 20% off the price of a home.

 

This is especially an issue in rural areas, where broadband speeds are often slow and where house prices are usually higher so the financial hit due to slow broadband hurts more.

 

If you’re looking at increasing the value of your home, or offsetting reduced value due to slow speeds there are a number of options available to you:

 

1)      Check if FTTC is available. Fibre To The Cabinet means that you’ll have a hybrid fibre and copper connection, the fibre runs from the exchange to your local street cabinet and from there copper into your home. Speeds available are up to 76Mbps and are available from most ISP’s. Capacity at your local cabinet can be an issue, with some areas so oversubscribed that customers are having to wait years to upgrade, so we’d always recommend securing FTTC if it’s available to you.

 

2)      Is FTTP available? Fibre To The Premises means that you have a pure fibre connection all the way from the exchange to your socket. This full fibre connection can offer speeds of up to 330Mbps. Availability is relatively sparse at present and predominantly only available at select new build sites totalling around 350,000 properties, this is expected to increase to around 2 million by 2020.

 

 

3)      Check out Air Fibre – If FTTC and FTTP are not available for you, there are still options available. We wouldn’t recommend satellite solutions due to the amount of latency and high ping making anything other than normal browsing difficult. However wireless broadband suppliers, such as 6ginternet.com, can offer speeds of up to 40Mbps in selected areas. This can be as much as 20 times faster than your neighbours, a real differentiator when it comes to selling your home and the price you receive.