Smoke gets in homebuyers' eyes

[arminnie]

Habit's telltale smell sometimes snuffs real estate deals
By Douglas Brown
Denver Post Staff Writer

Bars? Nope. Restaurants? Nah. The comfort of your own home? Sure, you can smoke there. Just don't bank on finding a buyer to cough up market price for your castle when you try to sell it.

Unloading a cigarette-fogged house can be a drag.

"I'll never forget, this one woman came to the front stoop (of a house for sale) and said, 'There are smokers in there,' " says Christina de Barros, a longtime Denver real estate agent.

The smoke was too much for that potential buyer. She immediately lost interest in the house, which was owned by a couple in their 30s, one of them a physician.

Real estate professionals and others involved in the home-

selling business say smoke-saturated homes aren't rampant. About 15 percent of the houses Courtney Ingram lists with Keller Williams Executives are compromised by cigarette smoke, she says.

Smoke damage goes "beyond air freshener, or opening the windows," Ingram says. "It becomes part of the infrastructure. You literally have to be a complete smoker to not care about it. ... With a million homes on the market, it doesn't help saleability."

De Barros agrees. She says smoke seeps into everything, even light fixtures and windows. One seller "smoked so much I had to take a chisel and scrape the (residue) off the windows of the house."

The extent of the damage will vary depending on how much smoking took place behind closed doors and for how long. In houses where the patriarch sat in his easy chair and sucked back Camels for 30 years, and the matriarch spent afternoons doing housework with a Virginia Slims dangling from her lips, Ingram thinks, "You can never get rid of the odor, unless they remove the dry wall," de Barros says.

You really need to hope a fellow smoker is interested in buying these houses, she says.

"I've never had a client who doesn't smoke walk into a smoker's home and say, 'We can do this.' They say, 'Someone smokes.' "

It's not just the walls and carpets that soil the house for potential buyers. Furnishings too can suck-up cigarette odors. If the buyer keeps the upholstered couch in the family room after the house goes on the market, the stench could scare away potential buyers.

"It will take money off of a sale price," says Anne Kedl, the owner of Interior Assets, a real estate "staging" business in Centennial. Home sellers hire Kedl to transform their homes into showplaces for the sake of the home sale. "Smells don't sell," she says.

The same applies for the sale of stuff inside the house, says John Peters, the owner of Aristocrat Services in Denver, an estate-sale business.

"You can take a picture off the wall and see where the picture was hanging just from the smoke damage," he says. "With upholstered furniture, there's hardly any way to get it out of there ... It definitely hurts the sale of furniture, even wood furniture."

Peters said smoke is the "kiss of death" for upholstered furniture, transforming an exquisite antique wing chair into a "giant paperweight."

"You can tell that people know as soon as they walk in the door that a smoker lived in the house," says Peters. "So in the buyer's mind, they think, 'Oh my goodness, if I take something home it's going to smell like this house."'


So home and furniture sales can be tough, but that's it for disappointing intersections of home and cigarettes, right? Not so. Entertaining too can be challenging.

"I have friends who smoke so much inside they are virtually on fire," says de Barros. "I never go to their house if I have to go somewhere afterward, because I'll smell, it will be in my hair and my clothes.

"When I go there, I wear clothes that I can just throw in the washer," she says, "and I always go straight from their house to my house and change."

Staff Writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-820-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com

New carpet and paint help lessen the odor



Don't fret, smoker. Yes, your habit has jeopardized the sale of your home, but you've got options.

First of all, says Denver real-estate agent Christina de Barros, "It's always hard to tell people, but I (say), 'You've got to stop smoking inside, you've got to wash and scrub everything, because it's in the walls."

Cleaning often isn't enough though, says Courtney Ingram, a real-estate agent with Keller Williams Executives.

"Replacing the carpet is like 100 percent," she says. "It's the easiest thing to fix. And then ... if they are really serious, hire somebody to come in and do something beyond deep cleaning. They can seal concrete basements," for example, if somebody smoked a lot down there.

Ingram also prefers to show smokers' houses when they are vacant, because a deep cleaning and airing out will accomplish nothing if smoke-saturated furniture still fills the house.

But that strategy doesn't always work.

"You can't say, 'Can you move out please?"'

When real-estate "staging" expert Anne Kedl tries to ready a smoker's house for the marketplace, she'll recommend they paint the walls with a strong primer like Kilz if the odor is strong enough.

Estate-sale entrepreneur John Peters recommends using Febreze products on smoky furniture. "It's really expensive," he says, "but you spray it on there, and it gets rid of the odors." But not always. Some furniture may never shake the aromatic evidence of its owners' habit.- Douglas Brown

 

[lowie]

let me tell you, as a realtor, it's not just smoke... it can be perfume, air freshener, scented candles, garbage, animals, etc... i've had many buyers walk into houses only to have to run out with sneezing fits! people with allergies are sensitive to all types of air pollutants. if you want your home to smell nice for a sale, clean it well and bake some cookies.

 

[aprilgail2]

My dad was a smoker and he died at 55..after he died we tried to get the smoke smell out. It took buying all new rugs, all new furniture, scrubbing the walls and ceiling and then repainting and buying new window treatments. After that anyone that smokes was free to use the covered porch outside of the steps with an awning over them to smoke. We were looking for a used car for my mother and there were some very nice cars tha twe simply would not buy since they did smell like cigerette smoke and you just can't get that out of a car.

 

[golfgal]

When we were looking for our first home many years ago we went through one house that was so smokey that there was a haze through out the whole house. There was no way you were ever going to get that smell out of the house.

We have been turned off of several houses because of bad smells, mostly musty, pet or smoke smells that you know you will never get rid of. Perfume, etc hasn't bothered me

 

[nannerbadnanner]

We passed on a house we really liked because of the smoke smell. We would have had to spend several thousand dollars to get rid of that smell. The master bedroom just reeked. That house sat on the market for at least a year...I honestly don't know if it ever actually sold or if they just pulled it.

 

[mtemm]

I've definitely walked out of houses before because of smoke. And air fresheners/scented candles tend to chase me out quicker than I normally would be (although thankfully those scents usually don't last forever like smoke seems to).

one house in particular stands out. like a pp said, it was so smokey there was almost a haze in the air. I didn't even make it to the kitchen. when I explained to the realtor, she acted so surprised, like she'd never heard anyone balking at a smokers house before. I'm pretty sure she was just putting on a show, and I'd say this probably confirmed it.

 

[PrincessKitty1]

The husband of the family who owned our house before us was a smoker. Apparently he only smoked in his study. The white mini-blinds in his study were orangey-yellow with nicotine or smoke residue!

I think he must have stopped smoking quite a while before we bought the house (he'd had a stroke and was selling the house due to the stairs and sloping lot), because there were no smoke smells in the house (and I have a very sensitive nose!). Plus they replaced the carpet throughout the house before they put the house on the market.

I would want a deep, deep discount on a house that reeked of smoke, knowing that it would need repainting and all soft good (carpets,drapes) would need to be pulled out and replaced.

 

[ZachnElli]

The realtor that sold our second house had a saying, "if you can smell it, you can't sell it". She told us that when we asked about other houses in our area that where our competition, and she said there was just one and they were smokers. She said it was a very nice house, it just reeked of smoke. My bil and sil are smokers and their first house is very nice and after they got moved in my sil just couldn't mess up her beautiful home with smoke. Bil wasn't happy, but he follows her outside to smoke too. Their house doesn't smell like smoke at all.

 

[ducklite]

It's not just houses, it's cars as well. I just sold my car the first day it was for sale because my ad clearly stated "Never smoked in" and every person who called about it mentioned that was what had attracted them to the car.

Anne

 

[perdidobay]

When my FIL was living (suprise...he died of lung cancer) the house he and MIL lived in for over 30 years was so smoke filled, I would get a headache within 15 minutes of stepping in it. DH and I would reek of smoke when we got back home after a weekend visit...even the inside of our suitcase would stink to high heaven and we would have to leave them outside to air out.
And like the article stated, everything in the house was yellowed... when the house was sold the buyer tore it down and buit a new house on the land.

When house shopping, the one thing besides smoke that would turn me off a house was pet odors...esp litter boxes..... I viewed one house that reeked so bad I don't know how the people living there stood it.

 

[Metro West]

I smoke but do NOT allow it in the house by anyone. I go outside to my screened porch and smoke. As far as the car goes, I smoke in the car but only with the window down and if the smell gets too bad, I put the top down and that usually does the trick.

 

[paigevz]

We passed on a house we really liked because of the smoke smell. We would have had to spend several thousand dollars to get rid of that smell. The master bedroom just reeked. That house sat on the market for at least a year...I honestly don't know if it ever actually sold or if they just pulled it.

So did we. They were an older couple and it was a two story on a really big lot.......he said it was getting too much for them. It was around the corner from my school, and they eventually just pulled it off the market...........a niece of the older people moved in.

 

[heidica]

When my FIL was living (suprise...he died of lung cancer) the house he and MIL lived in for over 30 years was so smoke filled, I would get a headache within 15 minutes of stepping in it. DH and I would reek of smoke when we got back home after a weekend visit...even the inside of our suitcase would stink to high heaven and we would have to leave them outside to air out.
And like the article stated, everything in the house was yellowed... when the house was sold the buyer tore it down and buit a new house on the land.

When house shopping, the one thing besides smoke that would turn me off a house was pet odors...esp litter boxes..... I viewed one house that reeked so bad I don't know how the people living there stood it.

My step-daughter's mother smokes more than a pack a day, and every time she came home after visiting her mom, I would just about gag when opening her suitcase. I would immediatley take EVERY piece of clothing and toys that could be thrown in the washing machine and wash them, even though her mom had just washed them. We would then have to immediately put the suitcase outside to air and leave it there for several weeks. You could smell the suitcase from anywhere inside the house and it just made us nauseated. Wish I could take the covering of the suitcase to wash it. The smell got better and we can now tolerate having the suitcase in the garage with all the other suitcases. Thankfully, the mom is not allowed to see my step-daughter any more, because the judge revoked her visitation rights so we haven't had to deal with this for over a year now (but that is a WHOLE other story).

 

[Caradana]

Revolting ... totally and completely revolting. I would NEVER buy a house if I could smell even a hint of residual smoke.

 

[preshi]

The only reason we own a home right now is because people were walking into it and walking right back out. The original owners smoked in here for 40 years. Everything was yellow and icky but we ripped up the carpet, refinished the hardwood, got a new A/C system and repainted and VIOLA! Totally loveable house with no smell. We've also ripped the kitchen and both bathrooms down to the studs and remodeled them so that's probably helped a little too. There would have been no way we could have bought in this area without the great deal! I consider us lucky

 

[UrsulasMyHero]

This brings back memories: When I was in training for DRC, we were taking a property tour and were at one of the DVC properties. One of the units was supposed to be NON SMOKING. We climbed up the steps (it was one of the larger units) and the stench of smoke hit us. I'm a non-smoker, astmatic, so It was like walking into a wall of odor. We entered cautiously and I put my hand on the door where the no smoking emblem was.

There were three special air purification units running, but the rooms (This was either the 2 or 3 bedroom villa) reeked of cigarette smoke. I guess the people who rented the unit thought that because they wanted to smoke and could only get a non smoking unit it would be "ok" to smoke inside. I'm not sure how long it took to get the stink out, but the housekeeping staff told us it could take a few days due to the heavyness of the smell.

Pets are almost as bad, especially if you have a cat that marks... there's virtually no way to get cat urine out of anything it's soaked into.

 

[mom2rb]

I took my boys house hunting with me. We went in to one house and my son wouldn't even go upstairs. He just said " This house smells too bad for me to even see if I like it."

 

[Disney Ella]

When we were looking at houses there was one that reeked of smoke too. The white walls were a yellowish/brown from all the smoking and there was no way we were going to spend the time/money to get rid of the smell, not when there were plenty of comparably priced houses that didn't smell.

 

[Am_I_There_Yet]

Sure 'nuff! I've had at least two buyers not buy houses that they loved, because of cigarette odors, and three due to pet odors.

It's very frustrating, because there is absolutely no guarantee that they seller will be able to get it out, and my buyers weren't wanting to chance it.