Green is good, but wrong color can make home seller blue

Posted by Nancy Guenther Chapman on September 4th, 2010 at 5:02 pm

By Dane Hahn

The Realty Column

When I first started sell­ing real estate, some 25 years ago, one of the “secrets” in our office was that blue houses don’t sell as well as homes of other col­ors. That office was in New Hamp­shire, and there were a lot of blue houses in the area.

Granted this was anec­do­tal evi­dence, which came from our agents when we asked, “What color houses sell fastest?” To that extent, each of the agents in the office filled out a ques­tion­naire each time they sold a house that dealt with a num­ber of vari­ables, but it seemed to show that blue was the “wrong” color if you wanted to sell quickly.

And we were able to ver­ify our find­ings when we dis­cov­ered that medium and dark blue were not avail­able col­ors from the vinyl sid­ing folks. I asked the local builder’s dis­trib­u­tor about sid­ing col­ors and was told that white and beige had been the best sell­ers but at that time yel­low was the “new” color.

At that par­tic­u­lar time I had a huge 5-bedroom home for sale located on a pri­vate lake, and with won­der­ful rooms and fancy mold­ings. It was blue, and it wasn’t sell­ing. After we had offered this home for sale for four months, I sug­gested to the owner that it might sell faster if it were freshly painted. (And I had in mind another color, prefer­ably yellow).

I wish I could say, a covey of painters arrived the next day, the house was yel­low by the week­end, and then dur­ing my Sun­day Open House the place went under agree­ment. Not so. The owner did take my advice — partly. The next day he went out and bought four 5-gallon pails of paint, and started a sum­mer do-it-yourself project. But the paint was not the yel­low I had hoped for; it was blue and an even darker shade of blue than the house had been.

I must say it looked nice even though it took him the rest of the sum­mer to paint the place by him­self, but the new color didn’t help the house sell. In fact that house list­ing was with­drawn when he changed jobs, which nixed the plan to move to New Port Ritchie; and as it turned out, the fam­ily liked the new “darker” look.

About that same time I was asked by the local news­pa­per, “Are you build­ing any green houses?” This was maybe 15 or 20 years ago when GREEN was not a style — back then it was still a color. Nonethe­less, the reporter was for­ward look­ing and help­ful enough to explain what she meant, and we were able to get on with an appro­pri­ate answer.

And so it is that today “green houses” are all the rage—but even back then, before the new name — our homes were pretty green. As I look back over my answers, I still feel that the efforts we were mak­ing then were excellent.

Think about these concepts:

• Our homes were built of renew­able mate­r­ial, (WOOD) for the most part. They were framed with stan­dard dimen­sional lum­ber with ply-lam beams and sheathed with OSB (ori­ented strand board), which is lumber-mill waste mate­r­ial that is glued into a wafer­board and sold to replace plywood.
• We were over insu­lat­ing the attic areas and sid­ing, and using a semi-permeable house wrap to allow mois­ture in and out with­out allow­ing drafts. We used high-R value ther­mal win­dows and doors that were sealed into the exte­rior house wrap and the walls, and a roof mate­r­ial under­lay­ment that was able to seal out even ice-dams. We could demon­strate our claim of no drafts with a cig­a­rette in an ash­tray in the floor of the unfin­ished liv­ing room. The smoke curled almost straight up, no side-to-side movement.
• Our heat­ing sys­tems were hot water fired by nat­ural gas (or propane) and were con­trolled by pro­gram­ma­ble ther­mostats. Hot water was either made off the sys­tem, or by a sep­a­rate on-demand heater. In the big­ger homes we used hydro-air sys­tems so we could include cen­tral AC.

These homes built almost 20 years ago still hold their own. Since then, there have been a num­ber of energy sav­ing refine­ments, but the homes them­selves are still effi­cient and look and live well. Today there are more effi­cient cli­mate con­trols, and more rea­son­able energy use in all areas includ­ing effi­cient kitchen appli­ances and cook­ing break­throughs, and of course CFL or LED light­ing systems.

Beyond that, there are more new prod­ucts that can take advan­tage of the sun to pre­warm water and to make and resell elec­tric­ity back to the power com­pany. Today you will see recy­cled prod­ucts in use like TREX decks and PEX water pipes. And due to our smaller energy needs, we now have lower rated home loads, no more 200 Amp sys­tems when 100 Amps is all you need.

So twenty years later, if energy use is a “hot but­ton” for you, don’t write-off homes of the 1990’s as being antiques. Many of them will serve your needs very well and for a min­i­mal finan­cial invest­ment can be upgraded to become equal to all but the prize-winners of the 2010’s.

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