Thirdhand Smoke And Home Value

[Terrel L. Shields]

A smoker's house can NEVER be cleaned sufficiently for the true fanatic,

If you took a perfectly clean home and lied and told a fanatic the former owner was a smoker, they would claim they could smell it. They are typically liars and would argue to their death that someone sometime in the past had smoked there. It is a classic phobia.

I sold my cousin's house after he died in it and was not found for 13 days. Hazmat cleaned it up for slightly over three grand. Mattresses, clothing, etc. was easier to just throw away, ditto curtains, throw rugs, etc. The rest was cleaned. Deep clean the rug, wiped walls, and there were chemicals used that did a lot. I think they also ran an ozone generator. Throughout the house that chemical smell was evident for a few days, the company set shallow trays of coffee and baking soda around. After a couple weeks, with windows open the chem odors were gone.

Buyers were informed of the death in the house, and the property auctioned by a nationally recognized home auctioneer. The agent broker estimated $110,000 and I concurred that it would appraise there but said as an auctioned property, it would bring 10% less. It brought just short of that number with 5 bidders present. No one noticed any smells.

 

[J Grant]

I am not an odor expert but a "death " smell, however awful, may not permeate beyond the surface of materials the way long term smoke will... a smoker in a house 10 or 20 years the smoke seeps beneath the surface of walls and floors so even professional cleaning /mitigation does not cure it . Sometimes it is so permeated the drywall has to be stripped and new put up .

If anyone has a true phobia about smoking they won't even look at a house where smoke odor is present or known. Most people don't have smoke phobias but dislike the odor and the health risks associated with it.

 

[RCA]

The opening post mentioned a survey that reported that home prices could decrease by up to 29%. A more detailed report of the survey is in http://articles.chicagotribune.com/...ondhand-smoke-resale-value-real-estate-agents.

"Event One is a smallish but nonetheless interesting study of real estate agents in Ontario, Canada, that suggests smoking could reduce a home's resale value by thousands of dollars. Real estate agents told pollsters commissioned by pharmaceutical manufacturer Pfizer Canada that having a regular smoker in a home can reduce its value by 20 percent, on average.

About 44 percent of the agents surveyed said smoking will reduce a home's value by some measure. Of these, one-third said the reduced value may range from 10 to 19 percent; another one-third said it could lower the value by 20 to 29 percent.

That is, of course, if the homes find buyers at all. A whopping 88 percent of the agents said that in any case, it's more difficult to sell homes where the residents are smokers.

Calculating such financial effects is a tricky thing, according to Naperville, Ill., appraiser Chip Wagner, who agreed that smells of any kind — pets, dampness, even a homeowner's profound affection for garlic — certainly could affect its sale price, though he said there's no solid formula for appraisers to follow regarding those conditions.

"Through the years, I've seen a lot of homes where people only smoke outside or in the garage," he said. "You'll walk through a home and not suspect anything, and (you) hit the garage, and it's overwhelming."

But then consider Event Two: We've become all too familiar with the concept of secondhand smoke — that's the mixture of exhaled smoke and the other ick that enters the atmosphere from the end of a lit cigarette. Health effects aside, it's a concern that has manifested itself in real estate terms, in apartment and condo buildings where residents find themselves inadvertently inhaling it via shared ventilation and heating systems and seepage through walls. Some landlords, including some of the nation's largest ones, have banned smoking because of it.

Soon, you may develop the same kind of familiarity with thirdhand smoke, which is a term that's just starting to make its way into popular usage. Thirdhand smoke is what lingers after secondhand smoke has cleared out — the noxious residue of cigarette gases and particles that settles on carpets, drapes, dust and other surfaces of a room.

Thirdhand smoke has long been suspected as a carcinogen, but at the time the Ontario real estate agents were opining that smoking could cost home sellers dearly, the scientific jury was still out.

But recently, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California claimed that they have shown that thirdhand smoke causes significant damage to human cells. It's carcinogenic, they say, and humans can be exposed to it through inhalation, ingestion or skin contact.

"Tobacco-specific nitrosamines, some of the chemical compounds in thirdhand smoke, are among the most potent carcinogens there are," Lara Gundel, a Berkeley Lab scientist and co-author of the study, said in a statement."

 

[Terrel L. Shields]

Real estate agents told pollsters commissioned by pharmaceutical manufacturer Pfizer Canada that having a regular smoker in a home can reduce its value by 20 percent, on average.

I find that absurd on the face of it because remediation costs rarely approach 30% of the value of a home.

may not permeate beyond the surface of materials the way long term smoke will... a

I would like to see your epidemiology study supporting that. My father smoked 3 packs per day. You could not smell smoked in the house and cannot today. I was in the house a couple weeks ago. I'm extremely sensitive to smoke. Smoke does not permeate most surfaces. But it does get stuck in CHA filters, çurtains, etc.

 

[RCA]

My current take on an adjustment:

1. Unless the owner was in the habit of dumping cigarette butts on the yard, the adjustment would be only to the improvements. That being said, the overall impact on property value would depend on the improvement/land value ratio.

2. For a standard size home under normal market conditions, occupied by one or more smokers smoking a total of 13 cigarettes per day in the house, for a period of several years, the likely adjustment to the improvement would appear from the single survey to be about 20%.

3. The impact on value would depend on the percentage of smokers in the neighborhood. It would likely have more of an impact in California (11% smokers) than Kentucky (24.5%).

4. It would depend on market conditions. In a tight market, it would likely have less impact than in a soft market.

5. The SF Bay Area is interesting in the latter respects. It is usually a tight market, with a low percentage of cigarette smokers. We would need to do a study here. The problem is getting good data. A buyer lucky enough to find that rare house he is looking for, might bend over quite a ways in overlooking THS residues, hoping to take care of the problem with a hefty ozone generator (not recommended by the way, as it creates new toxic chemicals) or remediation. Hard to say.

 

[J Grant]

I find that absurd on the face of it because remediation costs rarely approach 30% of the value of a home.

I would like to see your epidemiology study supporting that. My father smoked 3 packs per day. You could not smell smoked in the house and cannot today. I was in the house a couple weeks ago. I'm extremely sensitive to smoke. Smoke does not permeate most surfaces. But it does get stuck in CHA filters, çurtains, etc.

Your odor receptors may be off....or maybe your dad was careful who knows.... but its not about "you".....it's about most buyers in the market.

Regardless of cost to mitigate affect on value is also perception and stigma. Also, if the cost to mitigate is 10k, it "costs" the borrower 10k cash their own funds ( which they may not have or want to spend ) vs them not having to spend 10k cash to repair using financing to buy a home in good condition at a higher purchase price.

 

[Renee Healion]

Age reduces sense of smell, so do a surprising number of medications. Men lose their sense of smell more than women, both genders decline in their 60s. One of the first signs of dementia is a loss of sense of smell. So I think this may be more of an issue with age of buyer. Maybe younger buyers or those with young children would rule out properties with smoke smells alone. I distinguish an active smoker's home versus a damaged property. One is habitable by people who do not mind. The other is not habitable by anyone except another sad shut-in and I don't think they are house shopping.

The sticky orange substance I have seen was in closed up properties where a person sat and smoked for years and did not, or was not able to, clean. It was not concentrated in the kitchen. If you want to try for a correlation, I would go with tv cable location. It was in a living room, den, or a bedroom. It was something to be remediated by professionals, like Jay said, or more commonly, a flipper in a rehab. Ordinary smoking by an active person who is able to clean up is not the same thing.

Agents will warn if a place is really damaged by smoking here but I do not see any listings which mention that the house is occupied by smokers. Buyers can tell agents in advance what they strongly object to, so buyer agents can rely on private conversations with list agents to eliminate listings from consideration.

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/2/6/e001256

 

[Meandering]

We had a small incident here with a landlord that did not want any tenant who would cook curry in the house.

Apparently there is a lot of market noise around curry permeating sheet rock and carpeting, with horror stories of landlords having to gut their homes after the tenants have left.

But cigarette smoke,

It is not a "value" issue.

This is why buyers go and look at homes, and not just buy them sight unseen.
If a potential buyer is walking through a home and smells anything they don't like, smoke, cat pee, curry, mold or any other thing, they will just move on to look at the next property, not discount the price based on someone making the property acceptable to their personal nostrils. Sellers just wait until a buyer accepts the property.

"Smoker studies" are flawed in that, you don't know if the last people who toured through the property lite a cigarette, and that's why you smell smoke, or if the sight of uncleaned smoke and cooking grease stains is an indication that little to no basic maintenance and care has been given to the property. .Unless you can find a bunch of C2 homes that smell like cigarettes, you can not isolate the impact of cigarette smell, from the smell, or from it being an indication of larger deferred maintenance issues.

.I don't care how good of a sales person you are, there is noway to convince a buyer they could save $20 on a monthly mortgage payment if they accept a house they don't like because it smells bad.

Play all the magic math you want, it still won't convince people to buy, move into, and raise their family in a house they don't like.

.
.

 

[RCA]

Age reduces sense of smell, so do a surprising number of medications. Men lose their sense of smell more than women, both genders decline in their 60s. One of the first signs of dementia is a loss of sense of smell. So I think this may be more of an issue with age of buyer. Maybe younger buyers or those with young children would rule out properties with smoke smells alone. I distinguish an active smoker's home versus a damaged property. One is habitable by people who do not mind. The other is not habitable by anyone except another sad shut-in and I don't think they are house shopping.

The sticky orange substance I have seen was in closed up properties where a person sat and smoked for years and did not, or was not able to, clean. It was not concentrated in the kitchen. If you want to try for a correlation, I would go with tv cable location. It was in a living room, den, or a bedroom. It was something to be remediated by professionals, like Jay said, or more commonly, a flipper in a rehab. Ordinary smoking by an active person who is able to clean up is not the same thing.

Agents will warn if a place is really damaged by smoking here but I do not see any listings which mention that the house is occupied by smokers. Buyers can tell agents in advance what they strongly object to, so buyer agents can rely on private conversations with list agents to eliminate listings from consideration.

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/2/6/e001256

Well I don't think I can agree with that. I am 70.8 years old, and I have become far more sensitive to cigarette smoke with age. - If I am in an office building, and one person smokes one cigarette in the restroom, I will know it (if the ventilation system is so engineered), head to the bathroom, wait for them to exit, see the E-Cigarette holder in their pocket, scold them and just possibly report it. In fact, even if no one is smoking in the building, I don't like the cigarette smoke they bring in, that is remaining in their lungs, the THS on their clothes and baggage. - That, despite the fact that my sense of smell has overall degraded. Generally speaking, from talking with others, people do in fact become more sensitive to specific toxins and chemicals in the environment with time. They develop sensitivity. Some people are very constrained as to where they can work - if they can even venture into congested public areas.

My daughter worked for a while at a night club in San Francisco where there was a lot of second hand smoke. She never smokes, nor lets friends in the house who smoke. But her room to me smelled like there had been a cigarette smoker living in it. She left to go fire fighting up in Oregon for several weeks (her favorite job, as she loves to spend the day tramping up and down the mountains in fresh air and the physical work involved in cleaning up after fires). I ran an ozone generator in the room for several hours, and then opened the windows to let in fresh air for a week. The smell was still there, maybe reduced by 50%. I did the same thing over again and after another week the smell was pretty much gone. Understand, this was only from residue she had picked up from working at the night club. Amazing stuff THS.

The big problem in the SF Bay Area, is with software engineers and analysts from India, sometimes from other states, of which a high percentage are smokers. They smoke regular cigarettes outside, 25 feet from the building, but they bring in E-Cigarettes and try to smoke them in the restrooms, or find that in a cubicle with 6 foot walls, they can even duck down and take a few puffs without most people noticing, - if they are clever. But mostly, I would have to venture, they mostly just bring in THS on their clothes, baggage and body. I remember having real problems at an Apple building in Sunnyvale several years ago whereI had a 6 month contract to create and develop a testing language for their AI fraud detection system for Apple Store. This particular building - actually near the Advanced Micro Devices build where I worked back in the 80's had mostly software engineers from India - but also small teams coming in from southern US states.

 

[Terrel L. Shields]

Men lose their sense of smell more than women,

As I said I am very sensitive to tobacco smoke. Like Bert I could smell smoke on the clothing of nonsmoker's who worked in bars. But all our bars and cafes are smoke free and have been for years. The seller is a fool not to remediate this before selling.

Odors are odors. Cats, smokes, grease, dead bodies can all be remediated and probably for only a few dollars per square foot. It shouldn't take a huge bite out of price and I bet few sensitive buyers would really consider buying and remediation. They would simply go one to the next house.