Open House Ideas: Pleasing Scents That Help You Sell

If your home is on the market and you’re planning an open house soon, be sure it can pass the smell test. It helps to put yourself in the buyer’s shoes: if a house smells when you walk in, it has an immediate and lasting effect. Believe it or not, how a home smells is one of the most important considerations in ensuring a timely sale. Potential buyers immediately tap into a home’s fragrance and form first impressions based on whether that aroma is pleasing or offensive. Our sense of smell is more influential in many ways than our visual senses, mainly because our sense of smell is so strongly associated with memories.

There’s real biology to back this up, too. This article from Psychology Today offers a simple, straightforward explanation:

Incoming smells are first processed by the olfactory bulb, which has direct connections to two brain areas that are strongly implicated in emotion and memory: the amygdala and hippocampus. This may be why olfaction, more than any other sense, is so successful at triggering emotions and memories.

When you are staging a home for sale, in addition to all the visual niceties you or your home staging company displays, the power of smell can’t be underestimated. If your home smells bad, potential buyers will remember that and associate it negatively with your house, which is precisely what you don’t want. So, if you’re wondering how to make your house smell good, read on for easy tips and tricks you can try.

Good Riddance to Bad Odors

You’ve probably noticed that most homes have a natural scent; it likely can’t be attributed to anything specific, but it’s there. Your neighbor’s house has a particular odor. Your cousin’s house has a distinct smell. And yours does, although you don’t realize it. (There’s even a term for this: nose blind.)

Most people cannot detect the natural scent of their own home, unless it’s a particularly strong odor due to pets or other circumstances. That’s why asking your real estate agent or other trusted individual is always a good idea if anything smells amiss.

Give Your Home a Deep Clean

Clearing out strong house odors starts with thorough deep cleaning. You don’t want to mask offensive odors; you want to remove them. Following these steps helps:

1. Start by washing carpets, floors, and draperies, and then scrub clean all surfaces, especially in the kitchen and bathrooms.
2. Once your floors are clean, get in the habit of removing shoes before entering your house.
3. Throw out garbage in all trash cans.
4. Don’t let dirty laundry pile up.
5. Remove odors from pets (including pet food and urine stains) and cigarette smoke (if you smoke).

If this all sounds exhaustive, hire a local cleaning service to deep-clean your home.

Once your home is clean, keep it that way. You never know when your agent may contact you with potential buyers who want to tour your home. Before your open house, avoid cooking heavy or rich foods, especially meat or fish. These aromas can often linger around more than you’d like.

Give Your Kitchen a Deeper Clean

In your kitchen, where most open-house visitors tend to congregate, pay special attention to your appliances. Scrub down your oven/range/cooktop, dishwasher, and refrigerator until they sparkle like new. Toss any smelly foods (no prospective buyer wants to open your refrigerator only to be greeted by a waft of last night’s dinner leftovers) and place a fresh box of baking soda on a middle shelf to absorb odors. Using another box of baking soda, sprinkle a generous amount all over your kitchen sink as a scrub to clean and deodorize it, and pour a bit down your sink’s garbage disposal to freshen it.

Pro tip: To remove pet urine, use a cleaner specifically with enzymes that break down odor molecules. If the odor is particularly bad or keeps re-emerging in a particular area of flooring, you may need to replace that section.

Open House Scents That Delight

Once your home is rid of bad odors, you have a clean slate to begin staging your open house with pleasant, fragrant-filled scents that evoke happy thoughts. This is crucial because a welcoming aroma gives open house visitors a positive experience that they’ll remember fondly when thinking about your home after their tour. Fortunately, there are many delightful scents you can choose from, depending on the vibe or emotion you’re trying to evoke.

Fresh Air

Sometimes, simply opening windows and letting the breeze of fresh, clean air fill your home is all you need. Particularly during the spring and summer months when the warm air brings its own sweet aroma, fresh air can trigger happy memories of leisure and relaxation.

Essential Oil Diffusers

Essential oil diffusers are a popular way to introduce fragrances into your home — just be careful not to go overboard or your interior will take on a heavy perfume-like vibe, which is probably not what you’re after.

You can buy diffusers in many styles and designs to match your home’s interior. Some are larger and meant to be used throughout an entire house, while others are designed for single rooms. There are many essential oils to choose from, but the scents listed below are most popular. The size of your diffuser determines how many drops of essential oil to add for best results.

• lemon
• anise
• cardamom
• cedar wood
• cinnamon
• clove
• ginger
• nutmeg
• orange
• pine
• rosemary
• sage
• vanilla

Pro tip: If you have several diffusers set up in your home, make sure you use the same essential fragrance in all of them. This may seem obvious, but you may be accustomed to using certain fragrances in certain rooms, and your open house is the time for all hands on deck.

Scented Candles and Plug-In Oils

Particularly in the fall and winter, adding scented candles to your open house décor can be a powerful selling tool. An extra boost from the candles is that you can choose ones in specific colors to match your interior, or to evoke certain emotions, like silver and gold if you’re selling during the holidays, or pastels in springtime. Candles also add an elegant charm to your home, primarily when clustered in groupings, or as part of a tablescape or stylish centerpiece.

Scented plug-in oils are easy-to-use options that require only a simple outlet to release a pleasant fragrance that can last for days or even months, depending on the brand. You can find them in a variety of fragrances and designs to suit your taste, and they’re an affordable way to bring an aromatic bouquet of freshness into your home.

Simmering Potpourri

Perfect for winter open houses, a simmering pot of potpourri is a great way to infuse your home with cozy comfort. Simply simmer vanilla or potpourri in a pot of water on your cooktop or range for a snug aroma that will fill your house. And be sure to use a pretty pot. You can make your own natural potpourri by adding a few cinnamon sticks, a bit of vanilla extract, a pinch of cloves, and some orange rind to a pot of simmering water. Or keep it simple by simmering a couple of tablespoons of vanilla extract in some water, creating a deliciously sweet scent reminiscent of warm sugar cookies.

Pro tip: If you love the scent of vanilla, try dabbing some vanilla extract on some cold light bulbs. When you turn the light on, the bulb will heat up and release the vanilla scent into the air. Don’t care for vanilla? Use any other essential oil instead.

Fresh-Baked Goodness

Who can resist that warm, buttery aroma of fresh-baked cookies overflowing with oven-baked goodness? A beautiful basketful of warm chocolate chip cookies in your kitchen will fill your house with a delicious scent that potential buyers will long remember after touring your home. If they’re lucky, they may be allowed to take a few cookies with them as they leave, creating a lasting, yummy reminder of your home.

Decorative Soaps

One of the best open house ideas is also one of the easiest. If you have lovely soaps in pretty fragrances, simply place them in decorative bowls or trays in your bathrooms. They’ll fill these spaces with a fresh aroma that screams clean — exactly the emotion you’re going for in your bathrooms. You can also hide a few soap bars in closets, the laundry area, and other typically dark, crowded, and cramped areas to freshen them up.

Another Common Scent Solution

As you can see, creating the ambiance you want in your open house doesn’t have to cost a lot, take too much time, or require a lot of effort. When it comes to enticing potential buyers, a few easy solutions can go a long way toward creating the mood you’re after. Adding home warranty coverage is another solution for attracting prospective buyers, giving them reassurance that if any covered home appliance or system breaks, their budget will be protected. Learn more about how our coverage helps protect household budgets and provide peace of mind to homeowners. Get a quote today.

The contents of this article are provided for general guidance only. First American Home Warranty does not assume any responsibility for losses or damages as a result of using this information.