Some smells make or break a sale

Editor's note: This is the second part of a four-part series on sensory homebuying. See Part 1, Part 3 and Part 4.

When my boys were young, one of our good-behavior mantras for shopping expeditions was to "look with your eyes, not with your hands." As I wrote last week, in the first installment of this series on sensory homebuying, I've been watching and learning as my buyer clients have evolved far beyond looking with just their eyes, and into house hunting with all of their senses, including a sixth sense we'll get to in a couple of weeks.

Beyond sight, which we covered last time, is smell -- not a sense that seems related to homebuying in more than a superficial manner. I take that back: OK, every novice real estate agent has been told to throw some ready-bake Toll House cookie dough in the oven before an open house, to create a warm, yummy aroma (and correspondingly positive associations with the property) to woo attendees. And most agents in the business for any period of time have had at least one odorific horror story, after having either viewed or listed (and smelled) a place that needed odor eradication quick, fast and in a hurry -- to put it politely.

For the sensory house hunter, though, the role of smell goes way deeper than this. Smells in listed homes can evoke memories (real and imagined), emotions (from disgust to delight) and can even paint the background for a homebuyer's imagined lifestyle in a home.

In fact, while house hunting with some clients a few years ago, I exercised my advanced real estate advisory skills to work with them to develop a technical classification system for all the smells we were encountering in the homes we were visiting, which were given the general term "funk." Harnessing the powers I'd gleaned from watching entirely too much of the National Geographic channel, we classified individual properties' odors by genus. There was "paint funk," the quasi-toxic but cleanliness-implying smell of freshly painted walls. There was "cat pee funk" for, uh, the smell of cat pee, which, by the way, most homebuyers assume (be it correctly or incorrectly) is incurable. There was "cigarette funk" -- another ostensible deal-killer for clients who were concerned that nothing but ripping up the floor coverings and the subfloor would rid the place of that odor.

There was also "bio funk," our designation for odors that sometimes defied our efforts to pinpoint a precise cause (but were foul, nonetheless) and other times emitted from obvious but mortifying sources (like the clearly used toilets of homes with no running water or that recently vacated hospital bed in the living room). Enough said? Methinks so. Oh yeah, and there was "potpourri funk," that Realtor-created, saccharine fragrance genre that nine out of 10 of my buyers believe is an attempt to cover up a smell "flaw" with the home. ...CONTINUED

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