Styled, Staged & Sold

Bringing you the latest home design and staging trends. From REALTOR® Magazine.

2020 Paint Color Trends That Buyers Will Love

A common way to get your home ready to sell: Paint it to give it a fresh appearance. 

Whenever you paint, particularly if you’re doing it prior to putting a home on the market, you’ll want to pay attention to the current color trends. Pulling inspiration from the latest paint trends ensures that you get the freshest possible look for your home and prevents it from looking dated

Paint is easy, too! For example, one of the most popular home improvement projects is a kitchen remodel, which can cost up to $25,000 on average. One creative way to makeover a kitchen without doing a full remodel is with a quick coat of paint on the walls. This can be accomplished in a few hours and only costs around $50 per hour.

Each year, the home improvement website Fixr asks remodeling experts what they feel are the latest home trends. This year’s reports focused on paint color trends that will attract home buyers in 2020. Let’s highlight some of the findings. 

57% of respondents said a cool neutral would be a popular interior paint color for 2020

Read for the cool neutrals. This includes shades like white, light gray, and taupe. Cool colors are ideal for making spaces appear bigger and brighter. Neutrals have a more universal appeal than most other colors, too. Fifty-seven percent of home remodeling experts agreed that cool neutrals are the top color of choice for the interior. 

Most Popular Painting Style: The Accent Wall

45% said accent walls would be a popular painting style in 2020

If you want to highlight a section of a room, visually change the shape of a space, or just think a little color might be needed, consider an accent wall. This is a single wall painted in a contrasting color to the rest of the room. It’s a great way to add a bit of color, or to create the illusion of a change in size for the room, such as adding a warm accent wall to move it visually closer to the viewer. Forty-one percent of home remodeling experts called the accent wall one of the most popular painting styles for 2020.

White and Gray: Exterior Favorites

52% would recommend white or gray as exterior colors if you wanted to sell your house in 2020

White and gray were the clear favorites among home improvement experts when it came to giving the exterior a new hue. Respondents were given the chance to select more than one answer, and both white and gray each received 52% of the vote. 

These two colors work well on a variety of home styles and in nearly all regions of the U.S. Gray also comes in many different shades, so it’s possible to go darker in the South and lighter in the Northeast. You can match regional preferences and stay on trend at the same time. 

Selection: Match Your Architecture

77% responded that a home's architecture is most important when choosing a new exterior color to sell the house

Certainly, pay attention to the popularity of color when you go to paint your home. The majority of home remodeling experts also advise factoring in your home’s architecture in choosing the right color, too. Indeed, 77% of experts said the home’s architecture mattered most when selecting an exterior paint color.

Choose a color from that palette or a color that is designed to play up the architectural features of your home. This may mean using a different shade to pick out different siding shapes or to show off decorative features on the exterior.

For Small Spaces: Try Pale Blue

37% recommend pale blue as a color for small spaces

Small rooms can be challenging to paint and decorate, especially when you’re getting ready to sell your home and want the space to look its best. When it comes to choosing a paint color, experts recommend both pale blue and a gray/green as the two colors to consider. Both of these colors fall on the cool end of the color spectrum. 

Cool colors recede from the eye, which can make them appear farther away, and therefore make a small space appear larger. 

Stay on Trend With Your Trend

Trends are constantly changing, particularly in the design world. But a freshly painted home in the latest colors may help give it an upgrade that makes potential buyers fall in love. 

Yuka Kato
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Yuka Kato is an industry analyst at Fixr.com, a home improvement website dedicated to providing cost guides and advice. Kato writes about interesting trends and insights in the construction and remodeling industry. To learn about the cost of household remodeling projects, visit the Cost Guides

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