Smelly Homes Don’t Sell | Wasilla Real Estate News, Valley Market Real Estate

Smelly Homes Don’t Sell August 4th, 2007

Back in February a guest author wrote Why Scents May Not Make Cents When Selling Your Home. This point driven home as I was showing houses in Palmer yesterday.

We pulled up to a nice looking home. It had good curb appeal and was in an attractive neighborhood. But when we stepped inside the buyer almost turned around and walked out.

She said her throat was closing up and she was having trouble breathing. This house had new paint, a nice backyard and good layout. It was priced very competitively. In fact, the listing Realtor had paid for new carpet to be installed to help it sell. Likely, this was to help eliminate the cigarette odor that permeated the old carpet. The carpet was beautiful, but the place still stunk.

The odor was a mixture of stale cigarette smoke and scented candles. The prospective buyer couldn’t help talking about it the whole time we were in the house and she couldn’t wait to leave. This house is going to repel most buyers because most buyers don’t smoke.

We looked at four other houses yesterday that didn’t stink. She liked parts of all four and wants to see a few more before she makes up her mind. The stinky house was on the bottom of the list…in fact it doesn’t even make the list.

The sad thing is, the smelly house is probably the most attractively priced. But the price may need to drop even farther to find a buyer.

All because of the way it smelled.

Written by Marty Van Diest 3 Comments »

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 4th, 2007 at 10:17 am and is filed under Healthy Homes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

David said at August 4th, 2007 at 11:41 am
Another good idea is to have neutral party come into your home and give you an honest smell assessment. This is because as the home owner you become accustom to your home’s odors and no longer smell or notice them. Someone who has not been to your home, IS going to smell those odors and can tell you. This is a very good topic to bring up, because lots of people don’t like to talk about it and pretend it is not an issue, but for sure it is. I totally agree, a bad smelling home is a huge turn-off.
Marty said at August 4th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Good point David. A clean house doesn’t smell like anything and we all get used to the odor of our pets, etc.
Wasilla Real Estate News » Blog Archive » Smelly Homes In Wasilla said at October 6th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
[...] In a previous post a guest author discussed why artificial scents don’t make cents when selling your home. While cigarette smoke or pet smells are also marketing killers as I mentioned in August, covering these odors up is the wrong solution. [...]