Families face mounting pressure to consolidate wealth across generations while estate planning remains fragmented and vulnerable to legal disputes. Multigenerational living arrangements create immediate practical demands—but they also offer landowners a strategic path to preserve and compound family wealth through property improvement.

Investing in Legacy Properties

The challenge: knowing which investments deliver legacy value versus those that drain capital. Exterior expansions and material upgrades outperform interior renovations in cost recovery—a critical distinction for families planning multigenerational wealth.

Research from Zonda suggests that changes to the property’s exterior, both expanding the floor plan and improving the materials, deliver the best ROI, whereas interior upgrades are less likely to recoup their costs. For instance, a manufactured stone veneer has an ROI of 207.9%, while a garage door replacement is worth 267.7% of the installation price at the point of the property’s sale.

Practical Solutions for Multigenerational Living

The National Association of Realtors’ Remodeling Impact report details how converting existing structural shells into livable space yields relatively high ROI, often between 75% and 86%. This may be below the ROI of simpler exterior improvements at the point of sale, but those exterior upgrades have less impact than expanding livable space in the long-term context of legacy investments.

Analysts predict that around $105 trillion in assets will be passed from the postwar generation to their children and grandchildren between now and 2048, a fact that will undoubtedly have a huge impact on the broader economy. It also further emphasizes the importance of proper estate planning.

Original reporting: KRDO (Colorado Springs metro) — read the source article.