Magic Coat Why it pays to paint a property before you sell.

A well-applied lick of paint will always add a little gloss to your home’s sale price, writes Harvey Grennan.

How often do you see a fresh paint job when you inspect a house or an apartment for sale? These days, it seems almost compulsory for agents to recommend this improvement to any clients listing a property. After all, painting can be a relatively inexpensive way of giving your home a quick facelift.

Sometimes, however, painting can cause more problems than it solves. A cheap coat of paint over old varnish, or an acrylic topcoat applied over enamel without an undercoat, might last about as long as the marketing campaign before the surface begins to peel or chip. It then has to be stripped off, sometimes at greater cost than the substandard painting.

But how much will (good) paintwork really add to the sale value of your home, and how much does it cost? Before you begin calling contractors for quotes, you can roughly estimate the expenditure yourself. Professionals charge about $40-$45 an hour, which doesn’t include the paint and other materials. Alternatively, you can estimate the price of the job on a square-metre basis. For an undercoat and two top coats, architectural advisory service Archicentre puts the cost at $15-$40 per square metre for the exterior of a timber house if the timber is in good condition ($20-$60 if it’s in poor nick). Inside, the cost is $10-$25 per square metre, but you may have to pay extra for wall-surface repairs.

Online trades-hire outfit Hipages (hipages.com.au) provided the following indicative expenses: $2500-$3500 for a two-bedroom, one-bathroom unit; $5500-$8000 for the exterior of a two-storey, three-bedroom brick house; or anything from $10,000-$20,000 for the outside of a weatherboard house, depending on its size and condition.

The secret of a good paint job is all in the preparation. Nathan Waldron of Adelaide’s Sureline Painting advises homeowners not to be too price-driven when seeking quotes from painters. “Some people may go for a cheaper quote, but if the preparation isn’t up to scratch, you are going to see the results after a year or so,” he says. “It’s also important to match the correct type of paint with the surface.”

And now for the $64,000 question: what will all this effort add to the sale price of your home? “I often tell my clients that painting is the easiest and most cost-effective renovation you can do prior to marketing,” says Sam Varrica, director of Raine & Horne in Sydney’s Five Dock. “It’s a simple way to add life and shine to what could be a stale space.

“We’ve also had some excellent results from a simple sanding and painting of timber floorboards, which creates an attractive, modern feel without excessive renovation costs,” adds Varrica. “No case is the same, but a nice paint job may add five per cent or so to a sale price. What it certainly will do is make it easier to get a timely result.”