Buyers do not settle their upgrades in the showroom but over months. Close the upgrade phase after the kitchen and you miss the choices still to come. Keep options relevant until the deadline.
Upgrades in a new build are everything a buyer pays on top of the sale price: a kitchen above the allowance, different sanitary ware, more expensive tiles, or an option that was not in the base specification. In Belgium the sale price of a new-build home includes a budget for the finishes the buyer picks. Whatever the buyer chooses above that is charged as an upgrade.
It happens almost every time. In the Upgrade Benchmark 2026, covering 3,084 new-build homes in Flanders and Brussels, 91.9% of homes carried upgrades, with a median of €12,965 excl. VAT per home.
The amount is one side of the story. The other side is the shape. Upgrades are not one order but a series of decisions: the kitchen, the bathroom, the floors, and then everything that only comes up later.
Upgrades are decided over months, and a large share comes late. On 4 November 2026 Ziggu measured when buyers approved their paid choices, across 6,117 homes whose first choice fell between 2021 and 2023 and whose choices have since gone quiet. At the typical developer, more than half of the upgrade value (53.8%) came three months or more after the first approved choice. A third (34.0%) came six months or more after it.
It does not stop at one late choice either. In more than half of the homes (55.4%), the buyer still approved something they paid extra for six months after their first choice. The last paid choice fell a median of 7.3 months after the first.
There is a logic to that pattern. Kitchen and bathroom come early, because they fix where the services go into the floor. How that sequence works is in our piece on decision deadlines. The choices the site does not push can wait. And they do.
Treat the upgrade phase as the showroom visit in the first month and you miss a large part of what gets decided. After that first month the buyer is not done choosing. They are done with the choices the site forces on them. They keep thinking about the rest for months, and decide it with whoever is still offering it.
For the developer that has a concrete meaning. The upgrade phase is not a few weeks of work for the customer care team, but a thread that runs through the project from shell to finishes. Close it after the kitchen and you also close off the choices the buyer still wanted to make.
A buyer deciding on an upgrade is deciding about money, and they do it together with the developer. In the benchmark, 82% of buyers paid extra for the kitchen, 77.6% for the bathroom and 85% for floors and tiles. These are not edge cases. This is nearly every buyer, several times over.
Such a decision tests everything at once. Is the quote clear? Is the budget right? Do I get an answer in time, and do I know what I am saying yes to? A quote that sits in an inbox for two weeks costs more than that one choice.
More upgrades do not make buyers less satisfied. At the same developer, buyers with the most upgrades gave their developer no lower recommendation score than buyers with the fewest, measured in Ziggu’s own buyer surveys.
So the amount is not where it goes wrong. The follow-up is.
Upgrades get lost in the follow-up, not in the showroom. An option sent once by email competes from the next day with every other email the buyer receives. After a week it is out of sight, and nobody knows whether the buyer said no or never saw it again.
For the developer that is doubly expensive. Whoever tracks options in emails and a spreadsheet offers fewer of them, because every extra option means extra follow-up. Many developers hold back on upgrades mainly out of fear that the extra complexity on site will not outweigh what it brings in. That trade-off only adds up if you put the potential into the calculation too. The Upgrade Benchmark shows what comparable projects earn in upgrades per home.
Many options also need no new party on site. An extra outdoor tap or a water softener goes to the plumber you already work with. Put such options in a standard choice list, write it once, with ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot if need be, and offer it to all your buyers. That is low-hanging fruit.
The benchmark also shows that buyers do want options when you offer them. Of the buyers offered a heat pump, 71% took one. For solar panels it was 56.6%, for an EV charger 47.7%.
| Option in one email | Choice that stays visible | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the option sits | In the buyer’s inbox, among everything else | In the home’s file, next to budget and quote |
| How long it stays relevant | Until the email scrolls down | Until the buyer decides, or until the deadline |
| What the buyer sees | A price | The budget, the quote and what they pay extra |
| Who follows up | Whoever remembers | A status per choice, across all homes |
| What is left afterwards | An email thread | An approval with name and date |
Ziggu makes it easier to offer and follow up options throughout the project. Every choice sits in the home’s file, with its budget, its quote and its status. The buyer sees what is still open without anyone having to call, and the team sees per home what has not been decided or priced yet.
That lets a developer offer more without the follow-up growing with it. Clients tell us they have booked more upgrades since they started working with Ziggu. The buyer gets something back too: a choice they make when they are ready, and a price they know before they say yes.
