How a domestic lift can keep your home accessible – and add value if you sell

No ad break during ‘Countdown’ is complete without an ad for stairlifts, featuring a smiling person gliding up the stairs – and they’re a familiar sight in homes up and down the country these days. As one innovative company is proving, however, making your property fully accessible doesn’t have to involve a stairlift any more.

Stiltz Lifts – featured in our Directory here – was founded in 2011, when the company invented a unique electric domestic lift that travels vertically from ground floor to first floor, through an aperture in the ceiling, using dual rails or ‘stilts’. The design means that the lift requires no load-bearing walls, and its small footprint (0.62 sqm) allows it to be installed almost anywhere in the home – so no having to reconfigure your staircase to fit a stairlift in. Even then, there’s plenty of space to accommodate two people at once (and the dog), or alternatively it’s big enough to carry a person in a wheelchair.

With its origins in Australia but its global sales headquarters in Britain, Stiltz has gone from strength to strength as homeowners have realised how its lifts can make their lives easier and more comfortable, and allow them to keep living in the home that they love. Today, Stiltz home lifts are sold in nearly 20 different countries worldwide, including the UK.

From a property point of view, we like the idea that homeowners can install a domestic lift that avoids them having to move to a single-storey property in their later years, or spend a fortune reconfiguring and extending their existing home – and that’s before you factor in all the stress and upheaval that comes from building work or a house move.

Still looking at it from a property angle, though, we were curious about whether you can you take the Stiltz lift with you if you do move; and, if you leave it where it is, whether that will have an impact – negatively or positively – on the value of your home. Naturally, our friends at Stiltz were able to enlighten us.

On the first point, they reassure us that a Stiltz lift is easy to remove – so, if you would like to, it’s perfectly positive to take it with you when you move house. It’s also simple enough to reverse the aperture opening, sealing it up so you’d never know it had been there.

Apparently, however, most Stiltz clients do leave their lift where it is when they move, with estate agents reporting that a domestic lift is typically an attractive asset that adds value to the property during a sale. Alternatively, Stiltz tell us that in some cases, depending on how old the home lift is, they will make an offer to repurchase it.

Moving is not likely to be at the forefront of your mind when you buy a home lift, though – it’s more an investment in ‘futureproofing’ your home, ensuring that you can continue to enjoy living in the whole of the property for as long as you want.

But still, it doesn’t hurt to know that if you do decide to up sticks, your domestic lift can either move house with you or add value to your current property if it stays.