If you’re trying to sell a home, one of the most important aspects you need to take care of is smell. Household odors, if bad enough, can cause a buyer to run for the hills before they even take a couple steps through the front door!
A home with bad odors tell’s a buyer the home isn’t clean or the owner is lacking on maintenance. You may be a great housekeeper, but the troublesome odors are telling buyers otherwise.
How To Get Rid Of Household Odors When Selling A Home
Find the source: Whatever the source: pet soil, mold or mildew, smoke, or anything else. You have to find out what the odor is before you can target it.
Extra Tip: Ask a neighbor or your real estate agent if they smell any sort of funk. If they do, ask them to do a sniffer test to help you locate the source and annihilate it.
Kitchen Smells: I love cooking, and sometimes I cook something that tastes delicious, yet leaves quite the funk afterwards. If you have a showing after cooking something with a funky smell, you need to get rid of it fast. Common remedies to kitchen funk are household sprays such as Febreeze, Lysol, or Glade aerosol sprays.
Extra Tip: Put a small bowl of household vinegar next to where you were cooking. The vinegar will neutralize the source of the odor while the fragrance sprays will cover it up.
Musty-Moldy-Mildew Smells: The source of these smells comes from growing microbes. Fungus or bacteria have found a party and they decided to let you know with the stench. You can’t just spray something to get rid of these smells. You have to kill the culprits. You can use high acidic cleansers to kill mold and fungi such as vinegar, lemon solutions, or hydrochloric acid for bathrooms.
Extra Tip: If you don’t have time to do a full out cleaning before a showing, pull out some baking soda and cover the smell up. Baking soda, if you use enough, will absorb the smell until you can get to the source.
Pet Urine: Pet urine is one of the most common causes of house funk. It’s also pretty simple to get rid of. Go to your local pet store and ask what type of cleaning solutions they provide. If you don’t have time to go to the store, you can try 3 parts water, 1 part vinegar, and saturate the spot. Dab it up after letting it sit for 15-20 minutes. Afterwards, sprinkle some baking soda over the area to soak up the smell.
Extra Tip: You can find urine spots on carpet with a black light. Most pet stores will have a small black light you can use to scan for urine spots. Just turn out the lights and put your endless hours of watching CSI to use!
Cigarette Smoke: If you smoke in your home, this smell can cost you thousands of dollars on the selling price of your home. Cigarette smoke gets into everything! Walls, furniture, carpet, wood floors, you name it, smoke will stick to it. The cause of the lingering smell from smoking is the tar that accumulates over time. The tar will stick to anything. To get rid of the smell you have to get rid of the tar.
Get a rag and some scrubbing brushes, a bowl of vinegar, some charcoal, and some baking soda. You need to scrub everything from the walls, to the blinds, to the floors, to the furniture. Getting rid of cigarette smoke is one of the hardest smells to get rid of. If you can’t get rid of it, you may just have to hire a professional cleaning service. Paying a professional a thousand dollars to save you thousands on your selling price will be well worth it.
Extra Tip: There isn’t much you can do to remove smoke smells other then not smoking inside your home. Go outside!
If you want to sell your home, a fresh clean smell can be a huge difference between you and your competition. If you’re a pet owner, it’s a good idea to remove your pets from your household while you’re on the market. Ask family or friends to take care of your pets until your home sells.
A home with dander and funk will sit on the market.
A home that says “I’m fresh and clean” will sell.
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Hi, I’ve been in the destinkification business for years and found your article while I was researching the hard costs of selling a stinky house. It’s great that you took the time to educate sellers on how much a stinky house can really cost in terms of time on market and final selling price.
With what I do I usually work both sides depending on the deal… sometimes I work for sellers who want a faster sale for more money and sometimes I work for buyers who want to negotiate a good deal based on something they know they can fix easily.
I hope it’s ok with you; I’d like to add to your content that a gaseous oxidant like triatomic oxygen or chlorine dioxide can solve most of the odors you listed and they can usually do it in under 8 hours with very little work and no perfumes or other masking agents. My company doesn’t operate in your market so I can’t help you directly but you might want to look for someone who can. You’ll get huge bang-for-your-buck in any cigarette smoke or musty environment (especially with the triatomic oxygen)! I can’t do anything to help you in person but I’m happy to answer questions and chat; contact me any time.
Thanks for the great input Mike! I definitely leave this to the professionals, but if I do have any questions I will keep in touch.
There is nothing that will turn off a prospective home buyer then a smell when they walk in to the house.
I’ve been working as a real-estate agent for quite some time and have come across many different homes that had very odd and terrible odors in them and it would greatly affect the way people chose those certain homes. This one home had a lingering mildew/cigarette smell that gave the home no chance of anyone wanting to buy it. As desperate as I was to sell this home I searched the internet on how to eliminate odors in a home and I found this company Biocide Systems that has a product called the RoomSHocker quick release. I bought the 4 pack bundle and use them in the home (very easy to use) and let them sit there for 24 hours. When I cam back to check on the place I was truly amazed on the affect that it had on the very odd smell, it was completely gone! At first I thought no it’ll probably come back within a week but I ended up selling the home within 2 weeks after using the RoomShockers and there has never been any mention of odors since. I highly recommend this product with any odors you are dealing with! Thanks Biocide