You’re fundamentally misunderstanding how prices work (as does the vast majority of people, including journalists who report on these things). The price of anything is dependent on one thing alone: how much someone else is willing to pay for it. Any improvements you made might entice someone to pay more, but if they don’t care about the things you changed, they won’t pay for them and therefore the changes didn’t add any value.

If people are willing to pay 30% more from you doing nothing, then the value still went up simply because that’s the definition of value.

In the six years since 2016, what has been the cumulative amount of inflation?

24.2%

So a 30% rise in home value is not much, in real terms.