13 Aug Essex residents search for blue house exteriors more than any other colour
After a year that saw much of the UK living and working at home, it’s no surprise that interior updates and home DIY were some of the nation’s biggest past times in 2020. A year on, as we head into the warmer months and with home visits with friends and family back in full swing, it’s time to start paying attention to the outside of the home.
To help consumers on their way to homes with better curb appeal than ever before, Dulux Weathershield has released its first ever Great British Exterior Trends Report, packed full of insights on the outdoor trends that are taking the UK by storm, both in online searches and on social media.
Exterior paint
Refreshing the outside of your home can increase the value of the property and is a simple way to add curb appeal to your exterior. The search results from the last five years reveal that “house exterior”, which includes the walls, the roof, and any developments to the property (such as a conservatory), is on many homeowner’s agenda in the UK, with more than 71,000 Google searches each month.
Looking closer at the exterior paint types gaining the most attention, “outdoor wood paint” takes the top spot with more than 12,000 Google searches per month, followed by “brick paint”, “uPVC door paint”, and “grey decking paint”, each with 8,100 searches per month. Rounding out the top five for exterior paint types are “white masonry paint” and “black wood paint”, both terms gaining 6,600 searches every month.
Paint colours
As for the colours we are choosing to paint our home exteriors, the overwhelming colour choice across the UK is grey paint (7,130 searches per month). Searches for this paint colour doubled that of the next favourite, white paint (3,570,) and was also crowned the most popular in every region in the UK too. Whether the region is coastal or largely urban, densely populated, or rural in nature, choosing grey paint for the exterior of the home has united the country.
In contrast, on Instagram the most popular house colour is pink with the hashtag #pinkhouse currently showing 279,269 images, whereas #greyhouse only shows 69,089. While a pink house might not be as practical or timeless as grey, it certainly does give it an “Instagrammable” feel to a home.
Marco Helliwell, Founder and CEO of mypropertyadvice.com, the UK’s only 1-2-1 property advice service suggests influencers have a part to play here: “The pink house trend is focused primarily on Instagram. I think using these houses as backgrounds is the reason why there is such a high volume of the pink houses on image based social media platforms”. He also says there is value in adding on trend colours to your property: “For example, a house that is painted in say a pink facia, which is online for £650k will generate quick interest with multiple potential buyers. This creates a bidding war and pushes up the price – up to even £20k. However, if the property had a traditional and less striking facia and ended up on the market for a longer period of time then buyers may even offer below asking – up to £20k less, making the loss there as much as 6%.”
Across the UK, the only regions where pink exterior paint featured as a top five paint colour amongst all those searched was in the South East (8% searched for this), Yorkshire and the Humber (8%), and the South West (6%).
Instagram trends
When it comes to visual appeal, Instagram is a treasure trove of inspiration. When diving into the hashtag data around exterior design, some similarities to the search intel gathered were revealed, as were several differing trends.
