Patch Blog: Preparing Your Home for Sale With Paint

Back in 2007, only about 5% of homes on the market were staged. Today, that has jumped to about 25%, according to Barb Schwarz of StagedHomes.com.   Why? More real estate agents have discovered what statistics have shown all along: staged homes sell faster and for more money than non-staged homes.

Home owners ready to put their homes on the market need to make sure their property shines over the competition, and this means starting with the basics:  are your walls scuffed or dingy? Carpets dirty? Tiles missing from counters? These may seem like obvious things, but you’d be surprised how many sellers don’t bother with these details.

One of the easiest things you can do to give your home a facelift is a fresh coat of paint in a neutral color. This has nothing to do with personal style or taste – it’s about appealing to the greatest number of buyers possible by creating an environment that they can envision living in right away. In a sense, we’re creating a blank canvas for the buyer. This doesn’t have to mean boring, however. Choosing the right color can do wonders for giving a space a warm, inviting feel that appeals to buyers.

For example, we recently staged a beautiful Victorian home in Los Angeles. One of the owners was an artist and her fun personal style was woven into the colors she had chosen throughout the house. In preparation for putting the house on the market we repainted the blue kitchen in shades of yellow, which tied into the adjacent dining room wallpaper and completely changed the feel of the space. 

Since white can make a room feel cold and sterile, I like to recommend different versions of grey/browns and creamy tans. One of my favorite colors for a more contemporary space is Benjamin Moore’s Revere Pewter – it’s a gray-brown with a bit of green that looks fantastic with black and is great for unifying different woods and colors in a room. Photographed is a condo I staged where we used Revere Pewter on the walls. This color can also look great in a more traditional home.

When you’re putting your home on the market it becomes a product that needs the best marketing and advertising possible. Sometimes it’s hard for the homeowner to objectively see what needs to be done, so a professional home stager can be very helpful.

For more ideas on colors follow me at Pinterest.com/ArtisanStaging.