Smoke gets in homebuyers' eyes

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

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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.

- By Douglas Brown
Denver Post Staff Writer
http://www.denverpost.com/food/ci_3990637

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