, an associate professor of marketing at Smith School of Business at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Their findings came in large part from interviews with 17 homeowners doing renovations.“They’re seeing everything that’s wrong with their home and imagining when people come into their home [that] they’re also criticizing and scrutinizing and judging their home,” says Grant.
Homeowners are “torn between two ideas of what the home should be,” says Grant. The common wisdom is that buying a home ideally has two main benefits: You can build wealth and modify your space to your unique tastes. Grant’s framework shows these two benefits in conflict with one another. In a news release about the paint analysis, Zillow quoted Mehnaz Khan, a color psychology specialist andin Albany, N.Y.: “Buyers have been exposed to dark gray spaces through home improvement TV shows and their social media feeds, but they’re likely drawn to charcoal on a psychological level.”
“I’m always attracted to these unconventional things or unusual things,” she says, but her real estate agent “would constantly remind me, ‘Resale, resale, resale, resale.’ It was so stuck in my head. … We then moved into the house. I was so scared to do anything. I never painted anything. I lived in those white walls and I was always thinking about the next homeowner. Everything was for the next homeowner.