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The Best Colors to Paint the Interior of Your Sacramento Home
Are you wondering about the best colors to paint the interior of a house in 2018? You’ve come to the right place. Sellers choose colors that are comforting, supportive of their life style and reflective of who they are as an individual. When a Sacramento listing agent marches into the living room to announce that the seller’s choice of color will cost them hard equity when selling, sellers might not agree. And, it’s OK if they don’t agree. Perfectly fine. Nobody is forcing them to make repairs to enhance their value. If a buyer writes a lower offer because of the paint colors, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.
Sellers, due to their emotional attachment to the home, don’t always see things as clearly as a Sacramento Realtor. Still, the best we can do is inform, educate, and let the sellers make the choice that best fits for them. We can’t make that decision for them.
Probably the worst color to paint any room in the house is a brilliant white. It tends to kill the space. Especially if other colors are missing in the room. The result can be bland, dead, non-exciting. Reminds me of the people in white on the HBO series, The Leftovers. My team member, exclusive buyer’s agent Amy McMullan, says: “You can paint walls gray, throw up subway tile next to a hardwood floor and you can sell that all day long to Sacramento buyers.” We know because we’re out there in the trenches.
When my parents were raising their children, they had specific ideas of colors for each room. My parents’ best colors to paint the interior were 1950’s pastel. Pink for the bath, living room was green, kitchen yellow and bedrooms brown, blue or rose. Then, the 1960s and 1970s fell into place and everything was more vibrant. Orange became wildly popular. Over the years, white faded in and out until it finally vanished about 20 years ago. Taupe or light brown, coffee and cream dominated after our horrible hunter green and mauve stage of the early 1990s.
Today, gray or greige (a grayish beige) are the colors of choice. However, light tan is still popular. If you like, you can read an article by Zillow boasting how 7 colors made certain houses fetch higher sales prices. Be aware that much of the data is more general, not local to Sacramento. When you’re wondering about the best colors to paint the interior of your house, it should be a decision based on what local buyers want. Ask your Sacramento Realtor.
How to Tell if Your Home Does Not Need Home Staging to Sell
Your home might not need home staging to sell. Do you know how you can tell? Well, for starters, you probably can’t on your own. But if you ask a top Sacramento Realtor whose specialty is solely working with sellers, I bet she can tell you. When your entire focus in Sacramento real estate is listing homes and selling them — and you don’t work with buyers — you view the world through a dedicated lens. You see things differently than other agents. At least that is the case with me.
I can tell you in a heartbeat if your home does not need home staging to sell. Some homes do not require home staging, and since part of my goal is to increase net profit for a seller, I’m not sending them down that path in every situation. Because some situations simply don’t call for home staging.
Oh, you’ll hear agents say every home shows better with home staging, and that’s not entirely true. For example, tiny, small homes don’t always show better with staging. Too much furniture can crowd a small house. It can make a small house appear even smaller. A buyer will never know she can’t fit a bed in a small bedroom if there isn’t a bed there.
Two homes that I’m presently working on listing don’t need staging and for different reasons. One home is unique, with vintage designer wallpaper. Wood windows. Wood ceiling, beams and fancy millwork. Random planked floors. Handmade braided rag floor covering, wall-to-wall. It’s a special storybook house. Staging might detract from the period and make the home seem smaller. It’s not that large to start with.
Another home features a long room at the entrance, with a delightful bonus view through French doors at the other end. That’s the selling feature. The million dollar shot. I explained to that seller that she should stage the living room / dining area, separating the two spaces. While she does not need home staging to sell, she should stage that very important first impression space. Bring into focus the original fireplace and send the view out into the back yard.
This seller was excited when she called yesterday to say she met with my preferred home stager. The stager not only promised to stage the living area, but she threw in for free the staging of a yoga studio out back. As a bonus for the seller, she said, because I refer so much business to the stager. She makes me look good, and my seller is very happy!
If you really want to know if you need home staging to sell, ask an experienced Realtor for her opinion. In our present seller’s market, it is possible your home does not need home staging to sell.
A Land Park Agent Says Leave the Tenant in the Home for Sale
One of the really good things about a Land Park agent like me listing a home in Land Park is that I am very close and available in case of emergencies. We had one such emergency last night. An agent called me to say a brand new lockbox was flashing red and behaving badly. I dropped what I was doing, backed into the recycling can with my car because my husband left it in the driveway in an attempt to dissuade garbage pickers from tearing it apart, and dashed over to my listing to give that lockbox a good talking to.
Turns out it was as I had anticipated, and there was something wrong with the buyer’s agent’s display key. It would not read the lockbox. It was also dark, so she could been putting in the wrong code or even pointing at the wrong spot on the lockbox. Whatever the problem was, I was glad to be there to solve it. Doubly glad I live nearby. Why, if that seller had listed with some other agent who didn’t live in Land Park and was not a Land Park agent that home might not have been shown last night.
I always drop what I’m doing to take care of more important matters. Of course, if I was in the middle of driving somebody to the hospital, I probably would let my phone ring through to voice mail, but otherwise I tend to try to answer it.
I have another home to list in Land Park shortly. I’m going over today to meet with the owners and do a walkthrough to help them decide how to stage the home. Staging is so crucially important. For my other listing, I suggested to the seller that he go on the market immediately rather than wait for the tenant to move in a couple of weeks. That is contrary to most general advice, but then every real estate listing is different. In this particular listing, the tenant has the home decorated and staged beautifully, that it will look more empty and lonely without her stuff in it than it does now.
It’s rare that I ever suggest that a tenant stay in the home. But every so often, a tenant’s touch is so magical, it makes a world of difference. If you’re looking for a top producer Land Park agent, call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759.
Beyond the Marketing of Homes in Sacramento Real Estate
Many successful listing agents in Sacramento maintain an unusual love affair with real estate, coupled with a magnetic attraction to the psychology of marketing homes in Sacramento. We want to understand the techniques that trigger a person’s home buying button. Our brains are turned on by this. It’s often a matter of: W + X + Z = $, ding, ding, ding. We latch on to proven techniques.
We don’t let our emotions rule or get out of hand when dealing with people because it might not deliver the desired result if we go off half-cocked. It’s tempting to be snarky but if that snark irritates or annoys the person we’re trying to attract and receive an offer from, well, that’s a defeatist attitude and not in our seller’s best interest, much less anybody else’s. My advice to agents struggling with snarky syndrome is to suppress the snark. Save it for your friends who appreciate it. Or for your own blog. Like this one.
As a listing agent, I want buyers to feel comfortable and happy and their agents to be thrilled. That’s the goal. When all is said and done and the escrow has closed, is the buyer’s agent a hero / heroine to the buyer or a person to avoid by walking on the other side of the street?
Part of marketing homes in Sacramento successfully is achieved by making the buyer ecstatic over the home purchase. Home staging is a proven strategy and tends to generate a lot more money for the seller than homes that are vacant, and it generates happiness. It’s different than decorating or furnishing a home. Home staging highlights features of the home without making it apparent, and it’s an art. A decorator or designer can’t do it. Staging, when done properly, creates an emotion the buyer can’t get out of her mind, no matter how she tries to shake it.
Another aspect is responding quickly to the buyer’s requests for paperwork and being available if the situation warrants. Little is worse than trying to call the listing agent who has vanished for the weekend. Cooperation is key. Meeting reasonable expectations. Finding solutions. When you put all of these elements together, it’s a recipe for a successful closing and happy parties. It’s not just the marketing of homes. But that’s where one begins.
Sacramento Home Staging Agents Maximize Your Profit
The talents of a real estate agent are often multifaceted but Sacramento home staging agents are generally not real estate agents. Real estate agents must be excellent communicators, expert negotiators and excel at marketing, but they are not a home stager. That’s not to say that a real estate agent can’t give you home staging advice because she most certainly can. But if you want her to stage your home, she’s not the best person to go to — because her specialty is selling real estate not warehousing furniture, not to mention she does not possess the specialized experience that is required to create the stage. There are home staging specialists in Sacramento who do nothing else but that job.
A home seller would no more hire her listing agent to stage her home than she would hire the listing agent to paint the walls or replace an aging roof. If her real estate agent does offer to stage the home, it’s possible the home stager is a professional home stager and not an effective real estate agent. You also would not hire a mortgage broker who happens to hold a real estate license to sell your home. Well, some people might without realizing it. Then they pay for it later when it’s too late.
The fact remains you should hire a person to do a job that the person is licensed to do and solely specializes in doing. My real estate practice is so specialized that I have agents, for example, who work with me to show property because showing homes is not something that I personally do. I’m not that good at it, if you want to know the truth. I walk into the wrong house, get on the wrong freeways, break my nails opening doors and can’t keep my mouth shut if the place stinks.
I’m much better at representing sellers and selling homes for top dollar. That’s my strength. Being an expert listing agent is a real specialty. And I sell homes throughout Sacramento, Placer, Yolo and Eldorado. I can tell you if a room has too much furniture in it and to take down your photographs from the walls. But if your home needs staging — and let me say that not every home does — then I will be the first to tell you so and to help you to settle on a home stager. I have access to many home stagers in Sacramento in my arsenal, but I would never presume to do a better job for you at home staging than a professional home stager will do. To think that an agent would is a crazy presumption.
I prefer to hire the specialists when I need a job done professionally and so should a home seller. Don’t try to shop on price, instead, hire the home stager you relate to. They all tend to charge about the same; it makes sense to hire a professional home stager if and when you need it. Then listen to your home stager and take her or his advice. Home stagers focus solely on staging your home for maximum profit, and typically have earned degrees and certifications in the business. It’s an entirely different business from selling real estate, although it deals with the same outcome, a closing.
If you just want to dump your home in its present condition, I can certainly do that for you. But if I recommend a home stager, it’s because I believe you can make more to cover that cost of home staging and pocket the rest. I have a home right now that if it were sold in its present shape, the seller would lose about $25,000 to $35,000, but with home staging, with fees less than 1/10th of that potential loss, the seller will make a big profit. I’m all about maximizing profit. Home staging pays, it doesn’t cost. If your Sacramento agent suggests it, ask how much you will lose if you don’t.
