There are various means of increasing a property’s market value. The collective of UK-based estate agents Propertymark outlines numerous examples of home improvement projects that can add value to residential buildings.
Those strategies you could pursue in your own home include:
- Redecorating
- Replacing, washing, or repainting the front door
- Installing new light fixtures
- Sprucing up the garden
- Making over the kitchen
However, another idea worth adding to that list is utilising a lift installation service from a company like Sheridan Lifts. This move would deliver an array of practical benefits, such as easing mobility as well as strengthening security and safety.
It can also work out well for your building’s value on the property market if, at some point down the line, you want or need to sell.
Even property valuation experts could struggle to determine exactly how much value you would be able to unlock for your particular home by giving it a new lift — as the precise figure will depend on both the home and the lift itself.
However, estimates suggest that as a result of adding a lift to your domestic property, you could potentially add up to 25% to its value. This might not surprise you when you consider that domestic lifts have numerous benefits, including:
- Enabling people to move more easily between floors
- Providing statement design features
- Helping homes to stand out for the right reasons
It is worth remembering that a lift is not usually expected in a residential property, meaning that you can impress potential buyers of your home by putting a lift in it — especially if that lift has been assembled in a bespoke design.
Of course, lifts are much likelier to be expected in multi-storey commercial buildings. Even in these, newly installed lifts can have a myriad of practical benefits and consequently enhance the property’s value.
For example, high-speed elevators can help people to get around tall buildings time-effectively. Meanwhile, in shopping centres, goods passenger lifts can be used to shift heavy loads between floors.
What follows are further, in-depth details that shed light on the value of lifts — and how having them fitted in your home or workplace can potentially benefit the building owners and building users alike.
Improving Accessibility
One strong factor driving the uptake of home lifts is the growing proportion of the population entering the retirement market. An elderly person can often struggle to go up or down stairs and so be inclined to look for alternative options.
This helps to explain a House of Commons report’s revelation that 61% of older people were seeking to relocate to a bungalow. However, as the UK Parliament also acknowledged, such housing is not abundantly available.
This situation looks particularly problematic in light of the fact that the percentage of people in older age groups has increased over time.
When the UK’s Census 2021 was held, 18.6% of UK residents were aged 65 years or older. This compares to the 16.4% figure recorded in the previous census ten years prior.
However, as age increases, so does the likelihood of picking up a disability or a chronic health condition. Therefore, when it comes to bungalows, we can realistically expect the existing chasm between supply and demand to widen.
On the flip-side, one reassuring implication of all this, is that if you have found yourself increasingly struggling with using stairs in your current home, you don’t necessarily have to move to a single-storey residence.
Instead, you could call lift specialists from Sheridan Lifts out to your existing home. They could carry out surveys and use the findings to design a new lift so that it will be able to fit seamlessly into the building.
Examples of people who could benefit from having lifts freshly installed in their homes for accessibility reasons include:
- Disabled people
- People with chronic health conditions
- Elderly people
- Families with young children
Once in place, a lift can allow easy access to all parts of the building, which can grow in value as a result.
One simple reason why is that, once this lift has been fitted and is fully operational, chances are that no-one who later buys the home would need to incur time and costs on arranging lift installation work themselves.
Hence, you can essentially give your home much of the same appeal as a bungalow — a type of residence that, as we have established, looks likely to rise in popularity in the foreseeable future.
Enhanced Security and Safety
Naturally, when you are seeking a buyer for a domestic or commercial property, you will want to emphasise and prove to people that the building already comes with a wide range of safety and security features.
After all, no-one wants to know that, at the time they move into a given property, it will have large — and possibly glaring — gaps in its security or safety. It stands to reason that filling any such gaps in your property can enhance its value.
The good news is that when we install or refurbish lifts, we can fit them out with an array of advanced safety features. Those available from our team include:
- Emergency lighting fixtures
- Fire safety systems
- Smoke detectors
- Emergency stop buttons
One obvious question with regards to safety is how you can ensure that if a fire breaks out in the building and starts to get out of control, people will remain able to evacuate safely and firefighters will be permitted easy access to the fire.
Fortunately, the lifts we are experts at installing include firefighting lifts, which assist firefighters in transporting themselves and the required equipment, like portable fire pumps and breathing apparatuses, around the site.
Though some passenger lifts come with a ‘fire service override function’, you must not assume that this function’s inclusion would instantly make the lift a firefighting model. A firefighting lift’s key features include:
- Width of at least 1,100mm
- A minimum depth of 1,400mm
- Minimum rated load of 630kg
Our lift installation remit even extends to fire-stopping lifts, where any openings are sealed to stop fire, smoke, and heat travelling around the building.
The value of lifts like these should not be underestimated. According to reports, modern fires in buildings spread up to ten times more quickly than ever before — due to buildings today using products and materials considered flammable.
Furthermore, rest assured that once we have finished installing a lift, we will check it to make sure it operates safely. You can also take comfort from the SMAS Worksafe and SafeContractor accreditations our lift installation business holds.
Enhancing the Design of your Building
When someone first suggested to you the idea of having a new lift fitted in your building, you might have immediately felt a sense of dread that any such lift would surely look unsightly and stand out like a sore thumb.
You might be thinking this due to never having personally drawn upon a lift installation service before. It’s true that, once upon a time, mobility aids could be cumbersome and fail to blend in with their surroundings.
When we design a lift for a building, we take its architecture and layout into close account. That way, once we have finished installing that lift, it will come across as an organic and intrinsic part of the area where it has been placed.
Once you have commissioned a lift from us, you will be able to take your pick from the following non-exhaustive list of materials offered for potential inclusion in it:
- Metals
- Glass
- Marble
- Wood
You might be quick to assume that, in certain contexts, good looks should count for little in lifts. However, certain kinds of lift can actually have a major impact largely because of the first impressions they garner.
Just consider the example of glass lifts, which allow occupants to admire other aspects of the building’s interiors while travelling. The most popular types of scenic lift we professionally install include:
- Curved glass lifts
- Glass-bottom lifts
- Two- or three-sided glass lifts
- Panoramic lifts
Or maybe glass lifts aren’t right for you — since the most important thing for a lift from an aesthetic perspective is that the unit suits the building’s existing design. This can be by matching, accentuating, or complementing it.
This gets to the heart of why, if you are particularly eager for your new lift to look good, you ought to have it built to a custom design rather than sourced in more of a ready-made, ‘off-the-shelf’ form.
Fortunately, we are skilled and experienced at designing lifts in line with client-provided specifications. As a lift that looks ‘just right’ in a given space is less likely to be replaced later, it can appreciably boost the wider property’s value.
Improving Energy Efficiency and Reducing your Carbon Footprint
When someone is trying to decide whether to buy a particular property, they need to think about not only the cost of acquiring it but also additional running costs that would apply in the longer run.
These additional costs would include those of energy consumption. It is therefore sobering to think that a hydraulic lift journey has been found to expend as much energy in 15 seconds as a 60W lightbulb does over the course of an hour.
The takeaway from this is clear: the value of lifts can largely be tied up in how much energy they use. Fortunately, though, advances in escalator technology over time have resulted in the emergence of increasingly energy-efficient lifts.
We offer energy-saving lifts that come complete with such features as:
- Low-energy LED light bulbs
- Hibernate/standby mode for when the lift usage levels are lower
- Regenerative drive systems that return energy to the network
Having energy-saving lifts can thus help you to streamline not only your financial expenditure but also carbon emissions your property routinely generates.
Introducing BREEAM Standards for Lifts
The acronym BREEAM here means Building Research Establishment’s Environmental Assessment Method. It is used as a points-based standards system where newly built lifts are rated on their sustainability.
All of the lifts we assemble meet BREEAM requirements, as confirmed by independent licensed assessors who account for issues including:
- Health and wellbeing
- Water use
- Pollution
- Waste
- Overall environmental performance
Remember that if you do have BREEAM lifts installed, it will be possible for all of the associated benefits — including the reduced energy costs and lowered environmental impact — to be passed onto whoever next owns the property.
You can therefore advertise these plus points as tightly incorporated into the property itself if you do decide that you would like to sell it.
Cost Savings with Regular Lift Maintenance
One thing that could potentially put you off having a lift fitted is the prospect of needing to invest in regular lift maintenance for the long term. However, you need to think not only this maintenance’s cost but also its value.
What we are basically trying to get at here is that while you will inevitably need to spend money on lift maintenance, it can more than pay for itself over time.
One major reason why is that if you sign up for one of our lift maintenance packages, you can have us periodically check your lift for any signs of minor issues. If we do pick up on any, we can rectify them as soon as possible.
That way, we can fully restore your lift to its former condition before these small problems fester and potentially develop into much bigger ones that would not only be more inconvenient to put up with but also more expensive to fix.
The lift maintenance packages we offer include bespoke plans as well as the following standard options:
- Sheridan Standard — for clients with only one or two on-site lifts that have low usage rates or span few floors;
- Sheridan Comprehensive — an all-inclusive package that covers on-site service reports along with regular cleaning of lift equipment;
- Sheridan Premium — suitable for situations where it is imperative for lifts to perform optimally during periods of peak footfall.
What form your chosen lift maintenance package should take will depend on multiple factors, of which these are noteworthy examples:
- The number of lifts
- The type(s) of lifts
- How often the lift is used
- The lift size
However, no matter which of our lift maintenance plans you personally choose, we will ensure that your lifts are checked as often as is necessary for them to remain legally compliant and so spare you potential financial penalties.
This is another way that keeping up high levels of lift maintenance can help your business to save money on an ongoing basis.
Of course, when it comes to lift maintenance, it would be financially convenient for you to strike a careful balance. You want a lift maintenance package that covers the crucial bases but ideally without overstraining your budget.
This is the rationale behind why, when you enquire with us about utilising a lift maintenance package, we will seek further details about the lift(s) at the heart of the matter — so that we can give you a package that would especially suit.
It would certainly bode well for the value of lifts at your property if, should you decide to offload it at some later stage, you will be able to confirm to potential buyers that the lifts remain in the best possible working order despite their age.
Discover the Value of Lifts with Sheridan Lifts
When trying to figure out the value of lifts for your particular property, you should ultimately ask yourself whether the practical benefits of having new lifts fitted would outweigh the financial burden of doing so.
It is generally the case that elevators are worth installing in a building that:
- Has more than three storeys
- Is often — or intended to be — used by people of impaired mobility
- Has long flights of stairs but no alternatives to these
You should, for example, keep in mind that modern elevators can move as quickly as 500 feet per minute. This can prove a real boon in a workplace where members of an especially discerning clientele tend to turn up.
However, it can also help to make everyday life easier for the building users as a whole. In a home, it can spare disabled people much anguish — and, in a commercial setting, free up more time for workers to spend, well, working.
If you remain undecided about the value of lifts for your specific situation, we invite you to discuss the subject in detail with our independent escalator company, which has 40 years’ experience of the lift industry.
We can implement lift solutions at domestic and commercial sites anywhere in the UK, and would be happy to design a lift for your household or organisation.
Before we finalise your lift’s design, we will discuss your ideas with you at length so that the product you get excels both visually and in a practical sense.
You can get in touch with us by phoning our Manchester office on 0330 175 8744 or Watford office — which serves our London customer base — on 01923 609 617.