Not Every Home Renovation in Indonesia Pays for Itself at Resale. Here's Which Ones Actually Do
8 min read
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8 min read
Say you are about to spend Rp25 million on a bathroom remodel before you list your house for sale. Will you get that money back? That is the real question behind every home renovation decision made with resale value in mind, and most people answer it with a guess dressed up as common sense: new kitchen good, new roof boring, fresh paint cheap so it must be worth it. In the United States, a rigorous annual study actually measures this project by project, with real dollar figures. Indonesia does not have an equivalent study yet. Here is what the real data says, and how to think about your own renovation without a local number to lean on.
Every year, the construction data firm Zonda publishes the Cost vs. Value Report, the industry's standard reference for exactly this question in the United States. Surveyors and appraisers estimate, for dozens of specific renovation projects, what the average project costs and how much of that cost a home actually recoups at resale. No equivalent study exists for the Indonesian market. That gap matters, because it means every specific percentage below is a US figure, not an Indonesian one. Use it for the pattern it reveals, not as a number to plug into a Jakarta listing.
The 2025 report's headline numbers, cross-checked across multiple independent summaries of the same data:
| Project | Average cost | Value added at resale | Cost recouped |
|---|---|---|---|
| Garage door replacement | ≈ $4,672 | ≈ $12,507 | 268% |
| Minor kitchen remodel (keep the cabinet boxes, refresh fronts, counters, appliances) | ≈ $28,000 to $30,000 | 113% | |
| Midrange bathroom remodel | ≈ $25,000 to $30,000 | ≈ $20,000 | 80% |
| Major upscale kitchen remodel | ≈ $126,000 | ≈ $68,000 | 54% |
A garage door replacement recouping 268% is not a typo. For every $1,000 spent, buyers priced the home about $2,680 higher. A full luxury kitchen overhaul, the project most people assume is the safest bet, recouped less than half its own cost.
The pattern behind those four numbers is consistent enough to be useful even without an Indonesian version of the study. Projects that recoup the most share three traits: they are highly visible from the street or the doorway, they fix something every buyer notices immediately (an old garage door, a dated kitchen front), and they do not lock the next owner into your specific taste.
The projects that recoup the least share the opposite trait. A $126,000 upscale kitchen with imported stone counters and custom cabinetry is a renovation built around what the current owner wants, not what the next buyer is willing to pay extra for. Buyers will credit you for "clean, functional and updated." They will not pay full price for "exactly how I would have done it myself."
Indonesia's residential property market gives one honest reason to care about this pattern even more than a US homeowner might. Bank Indonesia's own Residential Property Price Survey put nationwide home prices up just 0.69% year on year in the second quarter of 2026, a slight pickup from 0.62% in the first quarter, but still one of the slowest paces on record. When the broader market is barely moving, a badly chosen renovation cannot count on rising prices to quietly cover its own cost. The choice itself carries more of the weight.
What Indonesia does have is real, current cost data for the renovations themselves, even without a matching resale-value study. As of 2026, according to multiple contractor and property-portal price guides:
Indonesian real estate agents' own published advice points the same direction as the US data, even without a percentage attached to it. Property brokerage PropNex Plus and financial outlet Kontan's MomsMoney both single out the kitchen and bathroom as the two rooms that most influence a buyer's first impression of a house, and both explicitly warn that an over-personalized, high-end renovation can leave a buyer cold rather than impressed. Kontan's MomsMoney has run a specific piece on bathroom designs that end up lowering perceived resale value, precisely the same major-project trap the US data quantifies at 54% and 40 to 50% cost recovery.
Take that Rp16,000,000 to Rp30,000,000 medium bathroom renovation and ask what it might add back at resale. There is no confirmed Indonesian percentage to apply here, so treat this only as an illustration of the US ratio, not a guarantee: if a medium, functional bathroom upgrade in Indonesia behaved anything like the US midrange bathroom's 80% cost recovery, a Rp20,000,000 renovation would add back roughly Rp16,000,000 in resale value, a real net cost of about Rp4,000,000 for a bathroom you also get to use while you still own the house.
Net renovation cost ≈ Renovation cost − (Renovation cost × assumed recovery rate)
Compare that to a full gut renovation at Rp55,000,000 with imported fixtures. Even at the US major-project recovery rate of roughly 40 to 54%, the net cost balloons to somewhere between Rp25 million and Rp33 million, for a room most buyers will simply re-tile to their own taste within a few years anyway.
Three patterns, US-documented and consistent with Indonesian agents' own qualitative warnings, are worth avoiding if resale value is the actual goal:
If you do renovate, keep the accounting honest on your own books, not just at resale. On NetWort's Holdings page, a house sits under the Real Estate manual asset category, which uses a default appreciation rate of 3% a year. A renovation is a separate, one-time cost on top of that baseline, not a change to the appreciation rate itself, so log the renovation spend and the property's own value as two different numbers rather than folding one into the other. That is the same separation our breakdown of rooftop solar's real payback period in Indonesia recommends for a different kind of home upgrade, one measured in bill savings rather than resale price, and it applies here for the same reason: mixing the cost of an improvement into your asset's value hides whether the improvement itself was actually worth what you paid for it.
If you are also weighing whether to buy the house you plan to renovate in the first place, our full breakdown of renting versus buying a house in Indonesia walks through that earlier decision with the same real-numbers approach.