“What color should I paint my home?”
Homeowners often ask, “What colors should I paint my home before I sell it?” And “Will the color I choose matter to its eventual sales price?”
Considering that paint is a big part of what makes a home attractive, this is an important question. How you paint your home reflects your personality, reveals your class, and determines if the home will appear modern or outdated to those who see or visit it.
Also, color is a very personal thing; there are no good or bad colors. Everyone has the combination of colors that they find most appealing. And there is no genuine basis for questioning the colors that a property owner chooses to paint their home.
However, if the homeowner is trying to sell that home, then it is a different matter. The colors they paint the home will affect its sales price. This is because the home color trends that dominate the housing market are always changing.
Why you should choose your home’s colors carefully
As with the fashion and technology industries, the housing market is constantly changing alongside the home buyer’s design preferences, explains Paramount Management. Along with the home architecture and materials, buyer preferences are usually in line with the latest home color trends, which are also constantly changing.
The factors that influence those changes are:
- Influencers: In any given year, certain organizations and individuals have great sway over the colors homebuyers think are “cool.” One such organization is The Pantone Color Institute.
- Color psychology: Colors have the power to affect people’s moods. Every color has this ability, but the impact of each color is different. Those colors with the most soothing effect on people will always be more popular.
- Market forces: The more a housing industry uses one color, the more that color will appeal to homebuyers. Those colors are also more likely to be featured in real estate and interior design magazines, further entrenching their dominance.
As a result of these triple influences, buyers will approach your home expecting to see those colors they have already fallen in love with. If you paint your home in those colors, they will view it as more valuable and are more likely to make a higher offer for it.
What are the currently trending colors that you should paint your home in?
Interior design scene with palette colors.
The best colors to paint your home
Market data shows that these colors can help you get a higher sale price for your home.
The home’s interior
The best colors for a home’s interior should feel both inviting and calming, making buyers want to live in it. The colors that do this the most are those in the greige spectrum and various shades of light gray. Greige is a mixture of beige and gray.
More specifically:
In the kitchen
The best-performing colors for kitchens are shades of light blue and soft gray-blue. Homes with kitchens painted in these colors fetched their owners as much as $1,800 above the expected sales price. Conversely, painting the kitchen in shades of straw yellow to marigold dropped its sales price.
Bedroom
The best results came from painting it with natural hues of blue and pale gray in the bedroom. These colors made the room feel bigger and added around $1,856 to the home’s value. The worst color to paint a bedroom is light pink.
Bathroom
When painting bathrooms, the cabinet color also matters. Light powder blue to periwinkle made the most impact in the bathroom and increased the home’s value by over $5,440. The worst color for bathrooms is egg-white or eggshell.
Living Room
In the living room, choosing an attractive color that helps people relax is important. Light beige is the color that does this best; it improved the home’s value by over $1,800. But the worst performing colors for living rooms are pastel gray to light blue.
The home’s exterior
The home’s exterior may even be more important than its interior, especially for people who are actually visiting the home. The exterior’s colors set the tone for what visitors can expect to see inside the home. It helps to prime them and put them in the right frame of mind.
Exterior walls
Delivering the most curb appeal with the house exterior will boost the home’s value. The colors that work best for this are various shades of greige. Homes with this color saw their value increase by $1,526 or more. Painting the home in taupe or medium brown dropped its value by $1,970.
Front Doors
Front doors matter because they are the focal point when people are about to enter the home. Front doors that are painted in black and navy blue pop out and make a strong impression. This small addition can add over $6,000 to the value of the home.