Vinings GA Real Estate

Linoleum Flooring

Choosing Upgrades

Atlanta Real Estate

Linoleum flooring is often perceived as a downgrade, not a standard feature.

During my last new home purchase, I had learned my lesson and upgraded any areas that featured linoleum flooring to tile with the exception of the laundry room. After all, it was only the laundry room, surely tile in this room was acceptable.

Later, I was refinancing this particular home and of the course part of this process calls for an appraiser to inspect every inch of my home. As she came upon the laundry room, she seemed surprise to find linoleum and even went a step further and said, “Wait, is this linoleum you have here?” And then it happened. The dreaded pencil mark notations in her appraisal book that I had in fact tainted my home with rubber flooring. She had just downgraded my home.

Now, I am sure each appraiser has varying sets of guidelines they follow but I figured the tiled rooms would be considered an upgrade and the linoleum flooring standard. She never said a word about the tile flooring as if this was expected. I could only imagine what she would have done had she found a stash of linoleum stored under my steps for future use.

Linoleum flooring has several drawbacks, the first being that it is a sign of a cheaper, low-end home. It easily traps dirt, is hard to clean and a nightmare to remove yourself should you decide to tile later. While many home buyers often think they can simply perform a tile job later, I would say only a fraction of them follow through with this plan. Tiling any room is extremely simple to do but it is very labor intensive and will take you far longer to complete than what you realize.

For those homes that come standard with linoleum flooring and offer the tile as an upgrade, builder pricing often seems very fair to what a contractor would charge. Where a builder makes their real money is offering a ‘tile upgrade” when a basic white tile is already offered as a standard feature.

I often see homes with a standard white tile but the upgrade charge for a nicer level of tile is often the same as if you hired a contractor to come in after the fact. Since you already paid for the installation of the standard tile in the base price of your house, you are essentially paying double for any upgraded tile work.