3 Ways Property Developers Can Use Ambient Scenting

Picture this.

It’s a chilly Saturday morning and house hunters are beginning to visit your display home.

Instead of the neutral “new house” smell or a stale generic air freshener smell used by so many other developers, your prospective clients are greeted with the rich and luxurious fragrance of sandalwood and vanilla with a hint of amber.

Suddenly, instead of tramping through your display home half-asleep and slightly disinterested, prospective buyers are pepping up and taking notice. What’s more, they’re starting to see your display space in a new light and as somewhere where they might actually want to live.

In the extremely competitive world of housing development, it’s important to work all the angles. The power of scent to create a pleasant and welcoming atmosphere shouldn’t be underestimated. In fact, research shows that using scent can not only help you get the sale, it can also increase the perceived value of a property by up to $100,000!

Here are the three most important things to keep in mind when using ambient scenting for display homes.

 

1. Pick a Winning Scent

Stay away from generic off-the-shelf scents and diffusers, they do more harm than good. Nobody wants their home to smell like orange scented industrial cleaner or be overwhelmed by cloying frangipani.

Prospective buyers are buying a lifestyle not just bricks and mortar, so it’s important to offer a high-quality fragrance that is unique, pleasant and compliments the ambience and lifestyle you are trying to create with your property.

Use fresh smelling scents to project a light, clean and fresh ambience for first home buyer properties where the main selling point is price and a first foothold in the property market. Scents with ingredients such as green tea, green melon, bergamot and mandarin will work well here. Utilise heavier, more opulent scents such as fir, cedar, vanilla, musk and amber to create a feeling of exclusivity and quality for more expensive properties.

You can also use signature scent at the entrance of the home and then use scents for each specific room say, a freshly brewed coffee scent or baking cookies in the kitchen, citrus or jasmine in the bathrooms and sandalwood or cedar-based scents in bedrooms to give them a comfortable, homely feel.

If you want to take the ambience of your display home to the next level, consider creating a custom signature scent for your brand. A pleasant and alluring scent not only sets you apart from the competition, it also creates a subconscious “scent logo” that buyers will instantly recognize and associate with your brand.

 

2. Match Scents with Seasons

Adjusting the scent of a display home to appropriately match the season is another winning strategy that should be utilised by developers.

Varying the scents that you use in colder months such as autumn and winter with that of hotter months like spring and summer is important for creating a seasonal ambience for buyers. While the warm scent of vanilla or pine and cedar might work well in winter, it would not have the same effect in the heat of summer where light, airy and fresher scents should be used.

 

3. Use the right delivery System

Many people who want to use scent marketing in their stores, properties or developments make the mistake of using fragrances that are of an inferior quality, or they use underpowered diffusion equipment for the area they are scenting.

A reed diffuser or candle might be perfect for a small bathroom, but it is woefully inadequate for the foyer of a display home and while a portable diffuser may be adequate to scent the foyer of a house, it will fall short if you are trying to scent several living areas at once.

Generally speaking, if you are scenting a display home, it is suggested you use a HVAC diffuser system which connects to air-conditioning ducts. Such systems also allow for efficient scenting over large areas and you can also diffuse different fragrances in different areas by using additional units at strategically placed air conditioning junctions.

 

A Final Word

Creating the perfect scented solutions and targeting different parts of a property has never been easier or more cost-effective and with the property market contracting in Australia and a glut of developments still in the pipeline, finding an edge over your competition is imperative.

Immersing a potential buyer in the experience of your space and allowing them to visualise living there, could be the difference between making the sale or losing it to a competitor.

You can read more about scenting for your specific industry here, or if you would like to discuss scent branding solutions for your business, please contact us to chat about your specific scenting needs.