Does exterior cleaning add value to a home?

The phrase add value carries at least three meanings, and the documents read here speak to only one of them.

• A sale figure: what a buyer offers and a seller accepts. No roofing, paving or glass document read for this answer measures it before or after a cleaning.
• An appraisal: the figure an appraiser puts on a home. None of those documents speaks to it either.
• Appearance: how the roof, the pavers and the glass look. This is the one meaning the trade's own documents describe, in their own words.

Separating the three keeps the honest part of the answer intact. The trade documents are specific about the look of a surface and silent on what anyone pays for it, so questions about price, appraisal or the market go to the listing licensee rather than to a cleaning source. When the question is timing a cleaning around a sale, that has its own answer in whether exterior cleaning is worth it before selling, and what a roof cleaning does and does not change in a sale's paperwork is in whether roof cleaning can help sell a house.

The word people reach for when cleaning and value meet is curb appeal, and its dictionary meaning belongs to the appearance column.

Merriam-Webster defines curb appeal as “the visual attractiveness of a house as seen from the street”.

The term has its own page, curb appeal, defined. What matters here is the column it sits in: a cleaning can change how a house looks from the street, and whether that change moves a figure is a question no dictionary answers.

Each surface has an association that describes the change, and each description stays inside appearance.

ARMA puts the roof case most directly: “There is no scientific evidence that algae is damaging to asphalt shingles, although it certainly affects the aesthetics of a roof.” TRI Alliance says of tile: “While this growth can result in a dull surface appearance, it can be treated to restore the original look.” Both are statements about how a roof looks, and neither turns a cleaning into roofing work; where that line falls is set out in where a cleaning stops and a roofing contractor starts.

For pavers, ICPI's sealer line has a functional half, that sealers “can protect pavers from stain penetration”, and it is printed here as ICPI's description of what a sealer does rather than as a claim about worth. What a sealer does, and the two families it comes in, is on the paver sealing section of the service page.

239 Exteriors' own paver line speaks in these terms, and it is worth reading for exactly what it says.

The company's paver flyer says that clean, sealed pavers boost curb appeal and help protect your investment. The same sentence is printed in full among the company's own words for its paver cleaning and sealing. The line names curb appeal, which is the look from the street, and it names no figure, no percentage and no appraisal.

Read that way, the line and the sources agree. Cleaning and sealing change how a surface looks, the associations describe that change, and the dictionary word for the result is curb appeal. What nobody in this chain has published is a measured effect on a home's price, so this page does not print one.