What Neutral Carpeting Means to a Sacramento Seller

I receive a lot of interesting emails from readers all over the country. I do my best to answer questions. Many of those questions center on short sales, probably because I write a lot about short sales and have personally sold hundreds of short sales. But since selling short sales takes up a small portion in retrospect of my annual real estate sales, I also field questions on other activities such as selling homes in Land Park and home listings throughout Sacramento that are not short sales.

I’ve been in this business almost 40 years. Not many agents can say that. But some things that were true 40 years ago are still true today. Take neutral carpeting, for example.

A reader from my About.com homebuying site wrote to me in quite a huff. She was a bit perplexed that I had not yet answered her inquiry, which I had not received because so much of these types of inquires go to spam. She had a “very important question.” She and her husband had been engaged in “repeated discussions” regarding the color of the carpeting for their mother’s home. They were preparing the home for sale and could not agree on which colors constitute neutral coloring. She did not understand the word “neutral.”

At first blush, one might wonder how a person could be confused. But the more I thought about it, it’s not so unusual for some individuals, especially those from other cultures, to be perplexed. Some of us live in a white-bread world. No color at all. But other cultures are awash in color and relish color. Color is treated as a daily substance. It’s water for the thirsty, spiritual for the soul and serenity for sleep. Color brings the world alive.

However, when you are selling a home, neutral is the recommended choice of color, especially for carpeting. It evokes no emotion and does not detract from the home’s features. It presents a clean slate, a home you can move in to immediately and decorate to your preference. It’s a light beige, a sheer coffee-cream, sandy fair-skinned brown, boring pale tan, much like the photo above. Above all, it is not white.

While Elizabeth is on vacation, we are revisiting her favorite blogs from previous years.