As the weather is becoming more pleasant, I’m finding more buyers and sellers getting into the mood of either purchasing or selling a home. Spending time this afternoon removing sold signs from properties, I was delighted to find the ground no longer frozen hard. Spring has always been my favorite time of year with one exception—the overly soft and muddy soil. It usually doesn’t last any longer than finding myself nearly up to my ankles a time or two. While showing a home yesterday, I noticed a neighbor’s dog wanting to come over to the fence but was exceptionally careful not to get its paws any more muddy than necessary. It made me smile in knowing there are even animals that don’t like walking in mud. That dog reminded me of a scene from Raider’s of the Lost Ark when the actors were carefully stepping across booby-trapped floors. Maybe that dog recalled an inherited memory from hundreds of generations before when experiencing quick sand or deadly peat bogs.
It’s again come to my attention with many buyers’ inability to look past the cosmetics of a home. Those things are the least expensive of home improvements and yet they seem to create some of the bigger hurdles. I really do hope there’s a return to the more neutral wall colors and the use of the reds as accents carefully chosen and sparingly used.
I’m really not a fan of white and off-white walls simply because they seem too sterile. I’d recommend to anyone to use the more neutral and lighter shades of the sages and grays simply because nearly any color of furniture will not clash with the wall colors. There are of course those exceptions where the rooms are very large and the ceilings tall. The tricks of pulling heights down and the “feel” of a room being smaller is done with the use of the more rich colors. Homes that have a large number of windows are also candidates for the more deep color tones to help soak up the excess light.
I was showing a home yesterday that had just a bit too much of the dark tones and was working quite hard to get the buyer to understand what a difference the look of the home would be if one were to lighten up a few of the walls. I know part of it is with many in that they’ve never really considered what a room or a building would look like were they painted a different color. For some quirky reason, I can almost always envision what something would look like were it painted a different color. This business of what color the dress was a woman was wearing in a photo that went viral on the internet was a bit silly, but it did give cause to remind me that many people see things in ways far different that others. The one color problem that I’ve had is when a powdery blue is migrated too close to the color gray. Some would consider their home blue while I would think it gray and at times visa versa. With the experience of selling homes for a very long time, I’ve personally found that blue homes trimmed in white are some of the hardest to sell in our area. I’ve known for a long time that the color blue is considered a cool color, but to be cold to the point of turning a buyer away in an interesting concept.
Being a marketer of homes has given me much insight as to what makes many buyers “tick” when it comes to their choice of homes. Perhaps in a very light and teasing way I’ll have the opportunity to say to a buyer, “Find your imagination switch and flip it on.”
