Choosing Flooring That Boosts Home Resale Value

Floors are the first thing buyers clock when they walk in, and they’re one of the easiest details to judge fast. We unpack how to choose flooring that boosts resale value without overspending, using real-world pricing logic and what buyers actually respond to when they tour a home. If you’re prepping to list, remodeling, or planning a flip, this one helps you stop guessing and start making upgrades that fit your market and your budget.

We dig into the big four categories homeowners compare most: hardwood, tile, luxury vinyl, and carpet, plus where waterproof laminate fits today. Hardwood stays “king” for perceived value, but we also talk about why luxury vinyl shows up even in high-end homes when low maintenance matters more than bragging rights. On the flip side, tile can look incredible and add long-term value, yet the labor cost can make it a tougher choice if you need an immediate return.

You’ll also hear the practical side of “waterproof” claims, why thin products can buckle or break, and how one skipped step can ruin the whole job. The most expensive mistake isn’t always picking the wrong floor, it’s ignoring subfloor prep and pre-install inspection so joints fail and floors crack. If you’re choosing flooring for pets, spills, sunlight, or quick repairs before showings, we lay out clear options and the tradeoffs behind each.

If this helped you, subscribe for more straight answers on flooring decisions, share it with a friend who’s listing soon, and leave a review with the flooring choice you’re debating right now.

To learn more about BPS Southeast Flooring visit:
https://www.BPSSoutheast.com
BPS Southeast Flooring 
Servicing Rutherford, Polk, Henderson and Cleveland County 
828-532-2141 

Transcript

Welcome And What To Expect

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the BPS Southeast Flooring Podcast, where beautiful spaces start from the ground up. Hosted by Jason Cripp, owner of BPS Southeast, serving homeowners, businesses, interior designers, remodelers, and flippers across Western North Carolina and upstate South Carolina. From luxury vinyl and hardwood to carpet and tile, if it goes underfoot, we've got to cover it. Expect practical tips, money-saving insights, and the occasional bad dad joint. Because around here, it's flooring for everyone. Let's roll without the bubbles.

SPEAKER_02 0:39

Buyers often notice floors first. So what materials, colors, and upgrades actually boost your home's value when it's time to sell? Welcome. I'm Julie Schwenzer, co-host and producer with Jason Trim, the owner of BPS Southeast Flooring. Jason, thank you for joining us again. We always appreciate your insight.

SPEAKER_01 0:57

I appreciate your time.

SPEAKER_02 0:59

Yes, so big question for you how do I choose flooring that adds resale value to my home?

SPEAKER_01 1:05

Yeah. The quickest way to look that up, there's a website called Realtors.com, and it actually gave me the information where it basically gave us the best on return on investment. So it went through the probably the four basic categories. So you had carpet, luxury vinyl, hardwood, and tile. And the most return on investment investing in your own home was hardwood. Because tile does add value, but it's one of the more expensive upgrades you can do to a home, but it doesn't give you an immediate return on value if you're looking at selling the home. It's great for long-term value, but it's extremely it can be extremely expensive in the initial purchase because the labor and the work putting the tile work in is probably one of the more expensive parts. Tile and stone can be expensive, but it's one of those categories where if you bought a$2 tile at Lowe's or you bought a$15 square foot tile at a retail store, the installation is not going to change a whole lot. The small characteristics and size of the tile will vary the cost, but overall the labor is very similar. When it comes to vinyl and laminate, it adds a good aesthetic. And sometimes if your flooring is worn out and you do need to get it where it needs to look better, but you don't want to go back with carpet, it's a good option because wood is going to be a more premium price than a plastic floor. I mean, that's technically when you consider laminate or luxury vinyl, those are composites or resins or plastic. They're not real wood. So the next the least expensive option you can use is carpet. So sometimes if the carpet's wore out, you can find carpet very inexpensive and just swap it out. So if you're just needing to make the house look better, carpet would be the least expensive to put in, swap out, and you're not putting a ton of investment in. So it it always comes down to your long-term who you who are you wanting to buy your home and how much money you have to invest in it to get that turnaround investment.

SPEAKER_02 3:23

And I was surprised by what you said that tile would be more expensive possibly than hardwood. Um, what flooring types in your experience tend to appeal more to today's home buyers? Is it hardwood?

SPEAKER_01 3:38

Hardwood is king. I mean, if you really think about it, luxury vinyl and laminate try to duplicate the look of hardwood without the money. But they also have the benefit of the laminate, and the luxury vinyl is the waterproof feature that a lot of people are looking at. I mean, I talked to someone in Florida that they have a huge showroom, beautiful outside of Naples, and they cater to custom homes. And people who don't have money to spend on whatever they want, they're still putting luxury vinyl in million-dollar homes. Because it's just that it's the least maintenance type product. And their thinking is, hey, I don't have to worry about it. It's but it's plastic, I can be abusive to it, I don't have to worry about sanding it. My dogs can get on it, it can get scratched up. So sometimes just the idea of who you're catering to will make a difference. It won't add a dollar amount of value, but it aesthetically harsh surface will always look better and feel cleaner when it's maintained. If you're looking for that real good quality, now they are crew. I've carry and sell products that such as let's say Bielin Wood Duro. It's a hardwood out of Sweden that is scratch-proof, dent-proof, and waterproof. But it's still hardwood. There's just a treatment that it goes through as an engineered wood that gives it those properties. There's another line of proximity mills that I have that has interlocking waterproof hardwood flooring and glue-down pet-proof hardwood flooring. So there's beginning to be more options that can benefit the same way as a luxury vinyl or a laminate, but giving you the aesthetic quality and the beauty of actual real hardwood. So if you're willing to spend a little bit more in the scratch resistance and the waterproof is a feature that you're really leaning for, we have a lot of those options here in the showroom, which many showrooms don't have those as options.

Quick Fixes For Damage On Budget

SPEAKER_02 5:40

And you know, last time we were preparing for this episode or what topic we were going to cover, you brought up a great point about that if somebody may have damage, and I know we're gonna get into this in the next episode, but if there is something that they need to correct in the home and the on the floor inside, that maybe there's a way that they can replace it without it being too expensive as they try to, you know, get the home ready for uh being put on the market. So what if there's like water damage or or something like that, or you know, pets just went crazy on the carpet, you gotta replace that. What are like the best options for that?

SPEAKER_01 6:17

It's always gonna depend on the on the customer's budget. So for a quick replacement, carpet's always gonna be your your fastest and cheapest option. You can get a real nice entry-level polyester fiber carpet that feels great, will last 15, 20 years, and you can install that, do any damage repair, and it's inexpensive because the installation for carpet is probably the least expensive of all the surfaces. And carpet itself, if you're in a polyester family, it ranges anywhere between$2 to under$5. And that's a really thick plush polyester that I sold a lot of, and people love it because polyester is pet-proof in that polyester can't be stained. It's it's a synthetic fiber that if you dump bleach on a good quality polyester, you dump bleach on it, you just rinse the bleach off, doesn't change the fibers. So it's a great durability, it's great for pets. If you're gonna have pets that wet often, I wouldn't encourage carpet because it is cleanable, but at the same time, it is more work to clean than a hard surface. So if you were looking to flip for a hard surface away from carpet, laminate's gonna be your best option for entry-level costs because that can be anywhere between above a$3 range to about$550 for a premium, maybe$6, that you can get light commercial grade laminate. So you get beautiful laminates, waterproof, dent proof. And when I say dent proof, that's within reason. That's not okay, you stand there with a hammer and try to beat it to see if it actually works. That's just your average dropping things on it, your everyday wear and tear type situations. Um, but a lot of people are sold on the luxury vinyl because the quote waterproof, it it replaced laminate for a period of time because laminate did to sell more laminate, they cheapened the quality, and in cheapening the quality, you get a lot of complaints of people putting it in, it doesn't perform like they expect because they bought a cheap floor. Luxury vinyl's kind of done the same thing over time where luxury vinyl, waterproof flooring Cortec, and all these things, it's waterproof. Yeah, it's vinyl, it's it's it's not a material that absorbs water in any way. But there's other issues you can run into. If you get it too thin, it buckles under the heat of the sun. If it's by a sunny window, if it's too thin and you drop something on it, you can break the click joints, so it starts falling apart. I mean, there's a lot of things that if you go too cheap, you're gonna have problems if you're not spending the money to do proper floor prep, if you're not taking the time to do a really good pre-installation inspection. So luxury vinyl then starts to get a bad wrap, laminates coming back that now they've created waterproof laminates. So once these laminates are locked together, no moisture goes through the joints. If anybody says, well, it's not 100% waterproof, because if you put it in water, it may have some problems. And my reasoning think is like if your flooring is underwater in your home, you got bigger problems to deal with, like a flood.

SPEAKER_02 9:44

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 9:45

So I mean, it's just like, yeah, it may not be 100% submerged, you're not building the arc out of it. You're you you're not going boat building with these products. You're looking at this is in your home. Spills, dogs, accidents, children, the occasional water gun or this water balloons and the the spills from the cereal bowl or your little babies experimenting. Hey, the dog's down there, let's feed the dog with my leftovers type thing. I mean, those are things you got to think of, those are real life experiences. But now they've created hardwood flooring that does has the has the same performance value. Now you can step up in the value of hardwood. So there is gonna be a level of that's a hardwood floor, it looks beautiful, it is hardwood, but you can also get more expensive hardwood, so you can get a thicker, wider, longer, more expensive finish because it's created in only factory settings. So you can get some beautiful products, but those are gonna be more products that you're gonna be hanging around your house and enjoying more than flipping for your house to sell. So you have to kind of be aware of the budget range and what who you're selling to, what your area is like, and what what you're kind of expected. Typical getting rid of carpet, going to at least a laminate and luxury vinyl will make the home more appealing. So going from soft surface to hard will help sell the home faster than just replacing with carpet. But if it's just like a few rooms here and there and it's hard surface everywhere else, flipping out the carpet and putting new carpet is going to be a quick, easy, inexpensive, and make it look better situation.

SPEAKER_02 11:28

And you know, we just have a minute or two left here. Jason, what mistakes have you seen sellers often make when they choose flooring, you know, right before putting their home on the market?

SPEAKER_01 11:40

The one I've seen so far is not necessarily from the homeowners, it's from contractors or flippers that put a real inexpensive product in and they don't do the floor prep. They don't they it could be a la it could be a vinyl product or a lamina, but they don't take the time to make sure the floor is completely flat. So with all these little dips in movements in the subfloor, those joints, when you step on it, begin to push and then eventually break. I had a homeowner that I gave them an estimate because they were gonna sue their contractor who built the house because their entire floor had places where the floor is cracking and breaking. And they had a little child where you hit it just right, you could probably cut your foot.

SPEAKER_02 12:27

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

So it's one of those things you can use an expensive product, even a really cheap product, but you're still gonna have to take the time to do all the prep work in the time to make sure all the requirements for the for the floor are met. If you're not gonna do that, a cheap floor will fail a whole lot faster than a higher quality floor.

SPEAKER_02 12:52

Well, Jason, thank you so much for breaking that down clearly. I wish we had more time, but I'm looking forward to learning from you in the next episode. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 12:59

Sounds good.

SPEAKER_00 13:01

That's today's step in the right direction from the BPS Southeast Flooring Podcast. Ready to finally love what you're standing on? Call Jason for a free estimate at 828-532-2141 or visit bpssoutheast.com. Luxury vinyl, hardwood, carpet tile, flooring for everyone. Thanks for listening. And remember, great rooms don't just happen, they're installed.