The big benefits of a balcony: A simple way to add liveability and value to your investment

Australians traditionally love the great outdoors, and there’s often nothing better than adding a balcony to a house or apartment to enjoy the view, create more space and bring the outside in.

In addition, for an outlay of, say, about $50,000, a balcony could increase a home’s value by up to 10 times that sum.

“I would just never buy an apartment in the first place without a balcony,” says Jarad Grice, a senior associate with Sam Crawford Architects (SCA). “But if you don’t have one, then it’s nearly always an excellent idea to have one added on.

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“The cost, the size and the style can vary greatly, but invariably our clients are thrilled when it’s finished.

“It can be a great place to sit in the sun looking at the view, or for hanging washing, or just can provide a clue to the outside temperature so you know what to wear out that day. But it always forms an extension of the living space and makes a huge difference to liveability.”

SCA has designed many balconies attached to houses and apartments over the years, including Venetian balconies for a three-storey heritage terrace on a steeply sloping plot in Sydney’s Balmain, and a Juliet balcony off floor-to-ceiling sliding doors for Waverley House in the city’s eastern suburbs.

“Retrofitting can be expensive,” Grice says. “But it could, in some instances, add as much as a third onto the value of a house.”

The location is key. For a house overlooking the Yarra in Melbourne, an apartment on Adelaide’s Glenelg Beach or an old art deco apartment beside a Sydney beach, the profit can be even more.

Pillinger agent Simon Exleton has seen $50,000 balconies inject a $500,000 boost to the value of $3 million to $5 million eastern beaches apartments.

“The apartments themselves become so much more attractive with all that hard work done, more space and often views, that there’s always more competition to buy them,” he says.

“Of course, there can be a lot of engineering needed to external walls, work to open them up and a 75 per cent vote of the owners’ corporation to agree to the project, but a balcony with a view … well, that’s as good as it gets.”

With a new, good-looking balcony, a poky investment apartment can suddenly pull in a great deal more rent and enjoy enhanced capital value, while an owner-occupier home will simply be so much more pleasant to live in with a balcony that’s cantilevered, hung or stacked.

Fluid Building Services managing director Clint Bowen has been adding balconies – costing usually between $50,000 and $200,000 – onto houses and apartments for 20 years, and loves seeing homes suddenly opened up to the outdoors.

“Older style homes just weren’t focused on outdoor living,” he says. “We did one block of apartments where each one was facing away from water views, as, back in the day, it was considered preferable to look out at the street. So we had to completely turn the interiors around to have the services at the back.

“With apartments, it can be a two-year process to get the owners’ corporation to agree and get approvals and drawings and do all the investigations and to come up with a system that’ll work. Then building them can be the easy part. We recently built 21 balconies within six months.”