Sagging Real Estate Market Demands a Fresh Approach

The housing bubble days when selling your home was as simple as listing with a realtor and waiting for the offers to pour in are gone, says ReMax commitment broker Tom Manolas. Sellers who want to score in the current buyers’ market need to do more than mow the lawn and tidy up the foyer, they need a serious edge on the competition. And it should come as no surprise to Whiff afficianados that that edge might lie in appealing to the buyer’s most primitive and emotional sense. In a nutshell, How does your house smell?

“If there’s a dog, musty or smoke odor, that’s what hits you when you walk in the door,” says Diane Burroughs, a 13-year veteran of DeHoff Realtors in North Canton. The sentiment is echoed by Steve Leung, founder of the Silicon Valley Real Estate Blog. “I look very closely at the reaction of my clients or even people just walking into an open house when they first walk inside. From that experience, it seems clear that nothing damages that first impression like a bad smell.”

Since you likely are not the best judge of your home’s aroma, Burroughs advises having a nonsmoker who doesn’t own a pet take a whiff of your house. If you fail the sniff-test, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get to work: Remove all litter boxes, dirty laundry, and aging foodstuffs. Have the carpets, drapes, linens, and even the towels hanging in the bathrooms thoroughly cleaned.

With the negative odors eliminated, it’s time to think about replacing them with the positive ones which can potentially add thousands to a house’s perceived value. Just as bad aromas will drive buyers away, good smells will lure them in–and the correct use of scent can improve your buyer’s mood, trigger his dearest nostalgic memories, and even influence his spatial perception of your home.

From Chapter 2 of Whiff!, “Nostalgia, Mood and Desire”:

“For years, those in the real estate business have known about the positive effects of comforting aromas, such as baked goods and vanilla. Lately, real estate sales agencies and homebuilders have been taking this advice to the next level, simulating smells of fresh-baked cookies and brownies while showing properties. D.R. Horton, who delivered over 53,000 homes in 2006, has implemented scent marketing strategies in some of their markets—along with Pulte, Beazer, Centex, and C.P. Morgan. Today, instead of making sure that your real estate salesman is as good of a cook as a pitchman, all he needs to do is to flip on the switch of a portable scent machine.”

So important is that first olfactory impression of your house to a potential buyer that, according to Toni Blake, an international speaker and author with more than 28 years in multifamily housing, even visual curb appeal takes a back seat. “It is important to understand that in perception versus reality, perception wins,” says Blake. “We know that we have five senses that we work with and that smell trumps sight.”