Soundtrack to a buyer's heart

Flickr photo by flattop341.

Editor's note: This is the third part of a four-part series on sensory homebuying. See Part 1, Part 2 and Part 4.

Intuitively, it would seem that views -- whether of the mountains, the ocean, the bay or even the neighbor's rusty, leaf-crammed gutters -- are the most influential sensations originating outside of a given home on a prospective buyer's impressions of the property.

I submit that this intuition is dead wrong.

Sound, in my experience, is the single sensory factor that poses the most substantive deal-making or -breaking power within the mind of a homebuyer of those sensory elements that are largely external to the property itself. Consider this: With views, one must actually stand near or at a window, on a deck or otherwise locate oneself particularly and then intentionally stop your other tasks and look at the outdoors.

Many homebuyers know that they will rarely partake of views in their daily routine of living in a home, or simply have more pressing reasons to choose to live in a place where great "vus" ("views" in truncated multiple listing service lingo) are simply nonexistent or disproportionately expensive vis-à-vis the enjoyment they would create.

Sound, however, is much more intrusive. A homebuyer-cum-homeowner needn't go anywhere, assume any specific posture or in any other way invite external sounds into their experience of being present in a home, either during the house-hunting visit or -- much more importantly -- during the years of future residence the visit is designed to help them envision.

With sound, simple vibrations of thin air emanate from their source and end only after infiltrating and being interpreted by the nautilus of a homebuyer's inner ear as anything from the neighbor's barking dog to the banging at the auto-body shop behind the home. Other than earplugs, dual-paned windows and those Mozart compilation CDs played on a loop by half the listing agents I know, nothing comes between the sound source and the buyer's ears.

As with the other senses we've discussed -- sight and smell -- the sound stimulus received by a house hunter during a "viewing" can turn that prospective homebuyer very strongly in either direction, for or against the home. A lot depends on the individual buyer's personal sensitivity levels to different levels and qualities of noise. For some, a freeway sound wall is a perfectly sufficient noise mitigator, even if it's literally next to the home.

For others, living next to a sound wall would be the first step on a path that ends at the local psychiatric hospital -- the noise would drive them berserk. (Note -- there is a 2007 Tim Robbins film titled "Noise" in which the city sounds of New York City send Robbins all the way off the deep end. Good viewing.) And still others parse out tolerable sounds by their type.

I recently had a client who couldn't stand the intermittent zoom of fast-moving cars on a nearby thoroughfare, but found the more constant whoosh of proximate freeway traffic to be white-noise-esque, almost oceanic.

The interpretation of specific sounds is very much a matter of personal preference. Obviously, many house hunters crave quiet. These folks want to live in an area where there is little or no ambient noise level from external sources like street traffic, schoolyards, commercial areas or flight paths. ...CONTINUED

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