Painting to Sell: What Color Homes Sell Best?

Wilma Horner said no to blue. And it paid off.

Horner, a broker for RE/MAX in Bridge City, Texas, had a client with a blue-colored facade. "I said we need to make a change because that's not going to attract people," Horner recalls of her exterior painting suggestion. Her clients agreed to go with a more neutral color. "It's turned out to be a positive," Horner says of the home's new look, which netted more than $100 per square foot. That is the going rate for a much newer home in the neighborhood, the Texas Realtor says with considerable pride in her voice.

Call it exterior painting to sell. Horner's basic rule, one underscored repeatedly by others with firsthand knowledge of what's selling, is to go mainstream. Try to appeal to the widest possible swath of buyers. This is no time to be idiosyncratic.

Or as Jackie Jordan, the director of color marketing for Sherwin-Williams, puts it: "Get rid of anything that's kind of obnoxious."

What are the color expert's other suggestions?