We all get those listings from time-to-time. You know,
- The house overlooking a twelve lane highway
- The place that smells like an all night poker game at the National Zoo's lion house
- A demon seed teenager is living in the attic with his bug zoo
- The basement has an unintended swimming hole with eighteen inches of standing water
- Your sellers are in the middle of a messy divorce and are using the house sale as a final opportunity to make each other nuts - and the remaining spouse doesn't want the place to sell.
While each of these situations is blog fodder all by itself, they all create an old elephant in the tent situation, and a lot of times, owners or agents try to hide the big guy!
I once previewed a house with a front door about 20 feet from I-95, and the sellers had a different CD player in each room, producing a cacophony of easy listening music that was intended to distract the viewer from the constant whoosh of semi traffic heading down south. It didn't work, and my feeling was that a few buyers wouldn't be bothered by the traffic, but the crazy combination of music - different in each room - would make anyone crazy.
One on my listings reeked of cigarettes and kitty litter. Once the seller moved out, we were able to start the airing out process, but the buyer was a family who smoked like chimneys and now have kitty litter issues of their own. If we had tried to mask things with pot pourri or scented candles, it would have been worse than honest tobacco and cats.
Sometimes, we can coax the elephant out of the house.
Sometimes we can't.
But we can never hide him.
We just have to find that special buyer who adores elephants - or at least doesn't mind adopting one if the price of the house is right.
Patricia Kennedy — Search Listings!
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Adorable post! Love it! You're right, if the price is right, some one will adopt that elephant, and maybe even embrace it!