The smell of your home makes an immediate, substantial and lasting impression on prospective buyers! Luckily, it is also one of the most affordable ways you can prepare your home for showings. As those commercials state, residents go “nose-blind” to the smells in their homes; we’re so accustomed to the smells that we live with daily, we simply cannot smell them anymore.
Some offensive, yet very common smells are food smells, pet smells, and the all-too-common, but very disconcerting smell of mildew that is common in our humid climate. You’ll want to start as soon as possible to work on eliminating these odors before you begin showing your home.
Beyond eliminating bad smells, you definitely want to bring in good smells, happy smells, safe smells. Our sense of smell is directly related to emotions. In fact, our brains register emotions from smells before we can even consciously recognize and name the smell. This makes smell a very important sense to employ for wooing potential home buyers! Science is on our side.
The following are a few tips for leading prospective buyers in by their noses:
- Clean and dry up damp places. Use products like DampRid to help pull out the excess moisture. Empty the water they capture frequently and keep them inconspicuous (it doesn’t make a good impression when buyers see them all over the house).
- Freshen your air conditioning vents. You can do this by adding a few drops of essential oils to your ordinary disposable a/c filter or you can buy items made for this purpose.
- Choose inviting smells like vanilla, lavender, cookies, apple cinnamon or citrus. Stay away from anything with a very strong or chemical odor.
- Use plug in air fresheners and/or the kind that spray every few minutes to keep the smell fresh.
- Bake cookies just before an open house or special showing.
- Use essential oils. Add a few drops to cotton balls and hide them around the house. Add just a bit to your light bulbs and they will increase the fragrance when turned on.
- Be sure to ask the opinion of someone who doesn’t live with you. Our brains naturally ignore the smells we’re in contact with all day, so someone from outside of the home will be your best judge.
I have walked buyers into homes that are painfully average and lack the upgrades that buyers are looking for, and yet their scent and cleanliness made them immediate favorites! The opposite is also true: homes with exciting upgrades and perks that smell bad do not excite buyers the way they should, and the buyers often don’t even recognize why.
Freshening the smells in your home is an inexpensive, yet powerful tool in getting your home sold.
If you are debating listing your house for sale, let’s get together to discuss your home value, the current market and my strategies for getting you the best possible price and terms.
