If you’re a NYC area homeowner thinking about surefire ways to improve your home’s resale value, look no further than your home’s exterior. NY & NJ’s full-service remodeling firm MyHome notes that curb appeal definitely influences prospective homebuyers: after all, it’s the first thing they see, and first impressions hold uncanny sway over our perceptions.

While MyHome’s Texcote products offer many benefits, including energy efficiency through heat reflective paint, it is important to note that a new coat of paint is just a part of improving your resale value.

The first step in sprucing up your home’s exterior is to fix any blatant eyesores. Mend fences, walkways, and shutters—any flaw that will immediately draw the eye. Paying attention to landscaping is equally important. Landscaping need not be fancy and intricate but it does need to be neat, attractive, and highlight the home’s features, such as a freshly paved driveway or a wide porch. By planting perennials and easily maintained shrubbery you ensure that your landscaping efforts won’t be wasted should the home not sell this year. Hiring a professional landscaper such as MyHome for both urban and suburban landscaping is a great idea, especially if you’ve neither the time nor the initiative to carry the project through to completion.

Once these major problems have been addressed, consider repainting the home’s exterior in a color that fits in with other homes in the neighborhood. (While you may have a thing for pastel purple clapboard, your prospective buyers may not, especially if the home in question is a colonial in a conservative Westchester subdivision.)

A coat of quality exterior paint can dramatically increase your home’s curb appeal, but many homeowners balk at the price and at the prospect of repainting in a few short years. But a new product that MyHome is offering to area homeowners, Texcote Coolwall, is turning the world of exterior coatings on its head. This textured exterior coating is ten times thicker on average than ordinary paint. What does this mean? It means that since the coating is thicker you’re less likely to have to repaint in a few years, making a home with Texcote more attractive to buyers and more amenable to current owners fearful of expensive repainting jobs down the line.

Texcote has another advantage, though, that has nothing to do with curb appeal and everything to do with energy conservation. This textured exterior coating also contains special reflective pigments—the same type of pigments used by the U.S. government to cool ships—which means it can lower surface temperatures by as much as 40-degrees Fahrenheit. This translates directly into lower utility bills during hot summer months—a prospect that’s likely to please potential buyers, especially in today’s dire economic climate.