How a Paint Job Can Boost Your Home’s Value

When looking for ways to boost your home value, painting is a less time-consuming and more affordable option. Adding a fresh coat of paint to your house’s interior or exterior can give it a much-needed makeover, improving the appearance and value of your home. Painting covers dings, scratches and minor damage from over the years and can increase home value by several thousand dollars. If you’re selling your house, painting is a great way to increase your resale price.

Paint color takes up much of a room’s visual space — it draws the eye and can even influence your mood while you’re in the room. Choosing the right paint can make buyers feel more welcome, helping you to sell your home or make it a fresh, comfortable space for you to live in.

How Does Exterior Paint Increase Home Value?

First impressions can make or break a house sale — enhance your home’s curb appeal with new exterior paint. When painting the exterior, realtors recommend sticking to neutrals. Homebuyers want to visualize themselves owning the house, so selecting a calm, neutral shade can give them an attractive, stylish exterior to base their dream home on.

If you want to find the best exterior colors for selling a home, try gray or ivory for an inviting front. For homeowners who want some more color, soft blues, greens and yellows can create comforting, dreamy house fronts. Avoid bright yellows and greens, and keep your exterior color light and soothing.

While grays and whites create gorgeous exterior colors, adding a statement shade to shutters or doors can make a house stand out. Zillow’s 2018 Paint Color Analysis found that homes with charcoal gray or black doors sold for $6,000 more than expected. Choosing stylish, bold accent colors can help boost your exterior appeal without intimidating potential buyers.

How Does Interior Paint Increase Home Value?

While exterior paint can help a home look fresh, new interior paint can provide a good return on investment. Selecting the right room color can lead to increases of as much as $5,000 based on the bathroom alone. Choosing interior paint that compliments the other rooms and designs of the house can help create a more cohesive, appealing home.

Fresh interior paint can also spice up your rooms by drawing the eye in stylish and novel ways. Use paint to accent unique home features or influence the size of the rooms with color contrasts and accents. Tuxedo kitchens, where the upper and lower cabinets are contrasting colors, can increase sale prices by $1,500. For kitchens, choose whites, off-whites and grays for the whole room or add a contrasting black or dark green for a stylish pop of color.

Using a darker shade with restraint works best for homeowners who want to add bold pops of color. Dark blue does well in bedrooms, but buyers tend to prefer lighter colors or neutrals in the living room and bathroom. Pairing lighter walls with a darker accent wall can give a room personality, making it stand out to buyers.

Exterior or interior?

Your home’s exterior is the first thing that other people see — whether it’s a guest you’ve invited for dinner or a potential buyer. That’s why realtors often recommend adding a fresh coat of paint before putting a home on the market.

According to HomeGuide’s list of top 10 improvement projects that generate the highest return of investment, a new coat of exterior paint can increase your home’s value by $2,222, while an interior paint job can increase it by $2112.

While an exterior paint job seems to offer more value for money, realtors agree that prioritizing either an exterior or interior paint job depends on a variety of factors based on the overall condition of your home. For example, if the exterior has peeling paint and other major signs of wear, painting the exterior would take precedence over tackling the interior.

Rooms to Prioritize

If you’re planning to put your home on the market, realtors say that the best approach is to paint your rooms selectively, choosing specific areas that potential buyers will respond to more strongly.

According to a Consumer Reports study, high traffic rooms such as kitchens and bathrooms are ideal places to begin. Entryways and foyers are also an excellent choice, as they’re the first interior areas that visitors will see. In addition, any room with a particularly bright color — such as a purple bedroom or a red dining room — should be prioritized as well, as it’s crucial to tone down the color so it will match the rest of the house. Idiosyncratic colors might be fun to live with for a while, but realtors say that they’ll often deter buyers who are put off by jarring colors that clash with other rooms.

Choosing the right colors

Realtors agree: The right colors can transform your home into a showplace you’ll be proud of. In fact, it’s a well-known phenomenon that specific colors can boost not only your home’s curb appeal but also its market value.

Toward this end, online realtor site Zillow posts an updated paint color analysis to determine the most popular interior/exterior shades on the current market. Here are a few takeaways from a recent study:

• Front door colors: Black or charcoal gray front doors can add $6,271 to a home’s value.

• Wall colors: Neutral shades like light blue and tan are perennially popular, but dark grays, blues and blacks are becoming popular too.

• Kitchen walls: Brick, barn red and raspberry red colors can devalue a kitchen by as much as $2,310.

• Kitchen cabinets: Tuxedo style cabinets (with white/light uppers and navy/black lowers) can boost home values by as much as $1,547.

• Dining room: Darker neutrals in brown shades (oat brown, medium sandy brown and browns with yellow undertones) can devalue a home by as much as $1,684.

• Living room: Warm neutrals such as tans (with peach or pink undertones), light taupe or dark peach can boost values as much as $2,793.

• Bathroom: Periwinkle blue (typically with a gray-blue tint) can add as much as $2,786 to your home’s value.

• Exterior: Homes with yellow painted exteriors are selling for up to $3,408 less.

Also, realtors say that while neutral colors like tan and light blue are perennially popular, today’s home buyers also appreciate pops of color (especially in dark tones of blue, gray and black). Another trend is to showcase contrasting colors in home exteriors, as well as high-traffic areas such as kitchens.

According to experts, warm neutral shades such as tans, beiges, golds and grays are best at enabling potential buyers to envision themselves living in the home, because these shades tone in with every type of decorator scheme and lifestyle imaginable.

Three more tips to remember: For interiors, light pastel colors can make smaller rooms appear larger, while darker colors can give a large space a warmer, more intimate feel. Also, realtors advise against using more than three colors on the exterior, as this can give a home a choppy, distracting appearance that might make buyers feel uncomfortable. Finally, it’s always best to avoid white, which can come across as too harsh for both interiors and exteriors.

Improve Your Home Value With Rent Painters

When you’re repainting your home’s interior or exterior for resale, you want the best job possible for the best results. Selling a home can be a big, overwhelming task. Trust our expert team to paint your home quickly and professionally, so you can start the selling process right when you want to.

At Rent Painters, we understand how stressful repainting a home can be — that’s why we take the hassle of painting out of your hands. Use our online tool to calculate an estimate or contact us to start your home refresh today!