: The most appealing front door colour revealed
Tue 07 Mar 2023
Paul Bennett, Director
Finally, spring is on the horizon and the Behr & Butchoff team is gearing up for the seasonal uptick of new properties coming onto the market. Every buyer wants their home to achieve the best possible price, and there are countless articles advising homeowners of how to add value and attract interest.
A new piece of research, however, singles out one activity as a way of boosting kerb appeal and potentially adding pounds to your property’s value. Painting your front door should be seen as an essential job before you sell up.
The polishing of hardware, adjusting a wonky number, a thorough clean or a fresh lick of paint will go a long way to making the exterior of a property smart and presentable but on the latter, what colour you choose can make all the difference.
A new study by Safestyle set out to quantify what colour front door adds the most value to a property. To do this, the company analysed over 1,000 semi-detached properties in the UK’s top 20 cities that were listed on Zoopla over the last 12 months. Safestyle then compared the average sold price of the homes - all with different front door colours - against the House Price Index average to see how door colour impacted the eventual sales figure.
It found homes with red doors achieved a higher average price than properties with any other door colour. In fact, homes with red front doors sold for £413,279 - +36% more than the national house price average (£290,003). The second most valuable door colour was grey (+20% more than the average), followed by black (+11%), blue (+2%) and white (+1%).
To Behr & Butchoff’s surprise, the regional breakdown showed that brown front doors attracted the highest sales price in London – selling for an average value of £871,851, compared to the House Price Index of £686,768.
Our estate agents took a rather sceptical view of the survey findings (we also read another piece of research that claimed a brown door can devalue a home by up to £700, while a blue door, can add up to £4,000 in value). Behr & Butchoff will, however, be paying extra attention to the colour of front doors in and around St. John’s Wood from now on! Whether you’re convinced by the results or not, it’s unquestionable that kerb appeal is important when selling.
For those who are swayed by survey results, other past studies have revealed that pebble dash, damaged windows, overgrown front gardens, dull exteriors, a bold shade of masonry paint, lack of maintenance and general absence of kerb appeal can put off home movers and lead to lower offers.
Behr & Butchoff invariably use a property’s exterior as the lead photograph when creating an online listing or a printed document, while the façade is the first thing potential buyers or tenants will see when they arrive at a property. Therefore an exterior spruce up won’t harm your chances of sales or lettings success.
If you are considering selling your property – or are looking for a new home with a red, brown or even purple front door – please contact Behr & Butchoff’s St. John’s Wood office today.