Selling Houses: Design Psychology and Interior Colors

Interior colors are vitally important to selling your home quickly, and for more money. But you must always take your target market and selling season into account, using Design Psychology techniques, when choosing the colors for the inside of your home.

One of the biggest mistakes sellers make is to paint everything white, which will make the interior of the home look clean, but does nothing to make buyers feel and look good. Your goal is for your home to must make potential buyers feel and look great in your home. When you accomplish that, you'll have a sale.

Consider Your Buyers

When choosing colors, always keep your target buyers in mind. If they'll be wealthy and highly educated, you'll want to use complex muted colors in your interior paint scheme. If your buyers will be less educated and in lower income brackets, concentrate on primary or pastel colors.

Your interior colors should also echo, in slightly lighter shades, the colors you've used on the outside of the house. That will give your home a greater feeling of harmony in the buyer's mind, and since people look better in colored rooms, your buyers will also feel better in your home. As an added bonus, buyers who liked your exterior scheme are also going to appreciate your choice of colors for the interior, which will make them more inclined to buy your home.

Consider Your Selling Season

Your color choices will also depend upon the time of year your home will be on the market. Use warm-color accents, such as reds, yellows, maroons, if you'll be selling during the fall and winter months, and cooler colors like grays, blues, and greens, if your home is going to be shown in spring and summer. Your ultimate goal is to create either the feeling of a cool desert oasis or a warm, inviting haven, depending upon the selling season.

Choosing Individual Room Colors

Consider how each room is used when choosing colors. For instance, kitchens look great and feel natural when painted with "food colors," such as celery greens and scrambled-egg yellows.

Main bedrooms are places for intimacy and serenity, so medium shades of green or blue work well during warm selling seasons, and rouge red makes a dynamic impact in cooler weather. Other bedrooms show well and feel great when painted in soft creamy tones of green, yellow, blue, or pale shell pink.

Your choice of colors will affect potential buyers in subtle, but powerful, ways, and by using the principles of Design Psychology, you can make your home much more appealing, even though your buyers won't even notice. All they'll know is that your home makes them feel good, which will make them want to buy it, and that's the most important thing.

(c) Copyright 2004, Jeanette J. Fisher. All rights reserved.

Professor Jeanette Fisher, author of Doghouse to Dollhouse for Dollars, Joy to the Home, and other books teaches Real Estate Investing and Design Psychology. For more articles, tips, reports, newsletters, and sales flyer template, see http://www.doghousetodollhousefordollars.com/pages/5/index.htm