Enhance Property Value with Strategic Painting: Tips & ROI Insights

A home purchase is the largest investment most people will make. And like any other investment, long-term growth is the goal. However, there’s no guarantee that your home will increase in value over time. Several factors determine your home is worth in the real estate market, many of which are out of your control, such as location, current market trends, and more. Fortunately, you aren’t completely powerless when it comes to boosting your home’s market price -- keeping your house clean inside and out, maintaining your surfaces, rooms, and features, and making incremental improvements and broader renovations -- all of these actions help you retain and increase your home’s allure and integrity.

Among these maintenance and improvement methods, painting your home’s surfaces is usually the most cost-effective way to prop up your home’s price. On average, an interior home painting project yields about a 107% return on investment (ROI), and an exterior painting project yields an ROI of about 55%. Achieving such a significant ROI depends on the quality and approach of said paint job. If you don’t put forth the proper effort and/or consider current trends, you won’t do much to deepen the demand of your home -- in fact, you might make it less valuable. No one wants that, so let’s go over five ways interior and exterior house painting can improve your home value.

How Painting Improves Your Home's Value

1. Increase Your Home’s Curb Appeal

While interior painting yields a larger ROI than exterior painting, freshening up your home’s outside surfaces and features has a more immediate and powerful impact on potential buyers. After all, your home’s exterior is the first thing any onlooker will see when passing by your property, and its appearance also sends a strong message about the state of your home’s interior. Indeed, real estate analysts have found that a home’s curb appeal can make a big difference in a home’s selling price, noting that homes with excellent curb appeal sell for 7% more on average than similar homes (i.e., homes in the same neighborhood of similar size and style) with less appealing exteriors. This single-digit percentage might not seem significant, but it might mean the difference between tens of thousands of dollars for some homeowners.

If you’re looking to increase your curb appeal, you’ll want to use high-quality exterior house paint and focus not only on your siding but also your trim, front door, garage doors, etc., paying close attention to colors and how they interact with each other to make your home pop.

2. Coat Your Kitchen Cabinets

When it comes to improving your home’s value, any interior renovation is worthwhile. That said, certain rooms may warrant more attention than others. Kitchens, for instance, are weighed more heavily than other home areas in determining the home’s overall market value. In other words, updating your kitchen will often increase your home’s value by a larger margin than updating your living room or bedroom(s).

More specifically, a minor kitchen renovation can yield an 81% ROI on average and greatly improve one’s chances of selling their home -- painting your kitchen’s surfaces counts as one such “minor renovation,” and you don’t even need to repaint the entire room. Indeed, merely painting your kitchen cabinets can go a long way toward transforming the look of your kitchen and attracting buyers. And like painting your home’s exterior, painting and/or refinishing your cabinets can increase your home’s value by 7% in some cases.

3. Invest in a Better Bathroom

If kitchens are the most significant interior spaces for selling a home, bathrooms are a close second. A moderate bathroom renovation can offer an ROI of up to 70%. Of course, a worthwhile bathroom update typically involves more than just a fresh coat of paint (i.e., new fixtures, flooring, caulking, etc.). The paint portion often makes the biggest difference, especially if you choose your colors strategically. For instance, interior house painters can tell you that light blues and greys are currently popular bathroom paint colors, and introducing them can increase your home’s overall value.

4. Don’t Forget the Details

When envisioning how you plan on painting your home’s interior and exterior, it can be easy to ignore the finer details. You might, for instance, focus so much on repainting your living room’s walls that you forget to touch up your baseboards or moldings or spend less time and energy doing so. Even if you don’t think these small elements matter in the grand scheme of things, remember that potential buyers will likely take notice, even if only subconsciously. Something as small as defining the edges of your baseboards, chair rails, door frames, and window trim can separate your home from another one that’s up for sale. Such minor improvements might not do much to boost your home’s market price, but they can certainly improve your chances of selling your home.

5. Consider Color Trends

We’ve already touched on the subject of paint color selection here and in previous blogs, but the point really can’t be reiterated enough: the colors you choose for your home’s surfaces (inside and out) can affect your home’s market value for the better or worse, depending on regional and local trends. Even if you painted your home 5-10 years ago with local trends in mind, its appearance might no longer suit the latest trends. Some potential buyers might like the look of your home regardless of whether it’s in keeping with the times, but you’ll be limiting your pool of purchasers if you don’t make some effort to modernize your home’s aesthetic. Local house painters can help you navigate this task due to their regular familiarity with house color trends in your area. It’s worth seeking advice here, too, as going with the popular colors can increase your home’s value by thousands of dollars.

A Little Painting Goes a Long Way

Your home is your biggest asset. Protecting this large investment and securing a substantial return depends on taking proper care of its various features and adapting to local trends when the time comes. While hiring home painting services may be a significant expense in the short run, consider the long-term impact this renovation (among others) can have on your home’s market value. The painting professionals at Nash Painting aim to help our clients in Nashville, Brentwood, and Franklin, TN, paint their homes the right way so they get the most out of their property, whether or not they plan on selling anytime soon.