How to …
give listings an appealing aroma

You know what really stinks? Having prospective buyers remember your listing only by its smell. While you certainly wouldn’t want a house to reek of tobacco or wet dog, you also don’t want to overpower buyers with "pleasing" aromas.

Smells intended to be appealing and provide ambiance should be subtle, like background music softly playing on the stereo. But you and your sellers need not spend the morning of an open house baking loaves of bread in order to subtly fill a house with welcoming aromas. Keep your smell-generating plan simple, so it can be employed both for an open house and for a last-minute appointment requested by a prospective buyer.

The following offer simple, quick ways to add to a home’s olfactory ambiance:

• Light scented candles.
• If selling a home in the winter, light a slow-burning log in the fireplace.
• Use tubes of ready-made dough to whip up a batch of cookies.
• Slowly heat a frozen pastry in the oven or put a Pop Tart in the toaster
• Grind coffee beans.
• Put out potpourri.
• Heat a pan on the stove and add a few drops of vanilla extract.
• Place a few drops of vanilla extract on a burning light bulb.

Even with these innocuous smells, you run the risk of offending someone’s nose. Your sellers might love their rose-scented candles, but a buyer might not. The solution? You can’t predict every potential buyer’s reaction, so just remember that a little goes a long way with aromas. And if you choose to use sprays or air fresheners, give them ample time to diffuse before a buyer walks through the door.

Of course, if your listing already possesses more than its share of smells, you may want to concentrate on eliminating aromas rather than adding to them. To clean the air:

• Scrub the inside of the refrigerator and place a box of baking soda or coffee grinds on a shelf.
• Dump baking soda down the garbage disposal.
• Run small pieces of lemon or apple through the disposal.
• Time and weather permitting, let Mother Nature do some of the work by opening windows and doors.

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