Email Elizabethsacramento home selling
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.
Why Sacramento Home Selling Odds Are In Your Favor This Winter
When a seller in Tahoe Park called a few days ago to ask me to list her home, she was feeling a bit despondent because a few other agents she called (before me . . . darn it, why can’t I be first?) didn’t seem like they wanted to work so close to Thanksgiving. Or at least that was her perception of them. They allegedly told her this time of year was bad for sales and weren’t that motivated to meet with her.
I can’t explain other agent’s behavior or attitudes, and I don’t try. It’s really none of my business what they do except to the extent I appear by comparison and, quite frankly, I’d rather stand on my own accord. I do know that about 10% of the agents do 90% of the business, and I’m in that top percentile.
This is a slower market than the spring market but it doesn’t make it a “bad” market for Sacramento home selling. It makes it a different market, and we use different strategies. For one thing, if your home is a little bit difficult to sell, perhaps it’s a white elephant or it has other challenges, selling your home in the winter is a much better time than selling that type of home in the spring. Why?
Because in the spring, your home might be 1 out of 50 homes. In the fall, when inventory dwindles and sales soften, your home might be 1 out of 5 homes. Wouldn’t you rather have that home that is one out of five, that home that will be shown and used as a comparison against each other? The likelihood is your home will sell. Especially if out of the 5 it’s the nicest home available. Buyers who purchase a home in winter typically need to buy, so they are much more motivated to choose a home.
If you wait until spring, and your home is not the nicest home on the market, well, it could sit and the days on market could pile up while buyers choose homes other than yours. When it comes to Sacramento home selling in the winter, a seller is probably much better off being that one home out of five than that one home out of 50 in spring. You can see the odds are in your favor this winter home selling season.
Call a Sacramento REALTOR who works the fall and winter market in Sacramento, Elizabeth Weintraub, 916.233.6759. Do you know when is the best time to sell a house?
