If you’re planning on selling your home in the next few months, start planning how you’ll stage it now. Staging is the art of presenting your home to its very best advantage and includes decluttering, adjusting the decor, and painting the house’s exterior and interior, all towards the goal of making it easier for potential buyers to see themselves living there happily and comfortably.
Should you paint your home before you list it for sale? Most experts and experienced realtors say “yes,” but not just any color will do.
Why Neutral Tone Paints Are Best for Selling Your Home
When it comes to presenting your home in its best light, it’s always smart to listen to real estate agents who know the market. While freshening up a tired, faded, or streaky paint job is always a good idea, not just any paint color will serve to help you find your perfect buyer. For best results, you should look for a single neutral tone to cover all of your home’s interior walls.
Color trends and preferences are highly individualized. What’s soothing or energizing to you might seem sleepy or too wild to someone else. Your home’s color scheme makes perfect sense to you, expresses your style and personality, and feels just right. Yet to a potential buyer, it’s likely to feel uncomfortable instead of comforting.
The major goal for a homeowner listing their home is to create the perfect unobtrusive background for all of the potential buyers that will be viewing the home’s interior. You want every person visiting your home or viewing its photos on the real estate sites to be able to see beyond your decor choices and instead envision themselves living in the space. Neutral tones help you do just that.
If you’re searching for just the right shade for your home’s interior walls, consider choosing one of the following neutral tones. Use one of them on every wall in your home to create a calm, uniform, comfortable background onto which your potential purchasers can project their own design preferences.
Greige
Greige is, as its name would suggest, a blend of varying shades of beige and gray. You can choose a greige paint with either cool or warm undertones, depending on the furnishings you’ll be keeping in your home while it’s listed for sale.
One of the most popular shades of greige for the last few years is Agreeable Gray from Sherwin-Williams. It’s a lighter shade that blends both underlying tones in relatively equal portions, creating a soothing vibe with the universal appeal of white but with a splash of personality.
Pale Neutrals
Another approach is to consider pale shades of your favorite color. Most paint lines offer a wide range of shades for any paint color you can imagine, each of which can serve the same purpose as any gray, greige, or beige.
One strategy is to choose a light tone of blue or green. Some studies suggest that both of these colors help homes sell faster. Choose a shade like Sherwin-Williams’ Hinting Blue or Behr’s pale green shades such as Calcium or Moth Wing.
Beige Tones
Paler shades of white and off-white can sometimes backfire on the homeowner by presenting a too-stark blank box, no matter what else you put on the walls or in the rooms. Yet beige tones also get a lot of criticism for being boring or staid. It’s true that some beige paint tones are less than appealing to home shoppers. If you stick to cooler undertones, you can prevent the rooms from seeming “overbaked” in natural light.
For a soothing yet sophisticated look, consider Kilim Beige or Accessible Beige from Sherwin-Williams, or Adobe Sand or Translucent Silk from Behr.
Paint Helps You Sell Fast
Painting your home before you list it will help you sell your home quickly. No matter what neutral tone you choose, hire a professional painter unless you’re very skilled and can ensure smooth, consistent coverage throughout your home.
