Red flag? Fresh paint and air fresheners everywhere

[wouldbeFTB]

I saw a property that I liked today, but I'm wondering whether the seller was trying to mask an issue with the flat (everywhere was newly painted and there were strong air fresheners in every room). Red flag?

I'd wonder about damp...

They're covering up damp.

My first thought was damp! Looking at the exterior walls some parts looked discoloured. I asked the EA about damp before setting foot in there. It's a Victorian house converted into flats. The windows are single-glazed.

I expect you're right about damp, but couldn't it alternatively be that it's been v recently painted as going on the market and the air fresheners are for the smell of paint?

It could be covering the smell of a smoker. It's impossible to get rid of without repainting.

Damp - like my DD's flat this year (she's a student). The damp started to reappear after about a month. Ffs

It's probably the house on another thread here where the OP was encouraged to paint the walls and use air fresheners to make the house sell.. along with rehanging the curtains.

If you like it, request no air fresheners on the second viewing. Say you have an allergy or something and see what they say or do. If an EA tells me there’s no damp that they know of, I casually add what they’ve told me in the offer email. “Based on the information provided by the EA on my viewing…”

We hope to put our house on the market soon, and are having to redecorate as the decor was tired and dated when we moved in, and we never got around to doing it up during the few years we have been here.

We will also be using air fresheners as we have dogs, and while we intend to remove them and their beds from the property for viewings, and be cleaning the house thoroughly daily, I just don't want to take the risk of a non-dog person coming in and smelling dogs, and being put off.

So in our case it will be nothing to do with damp, and purely that we are trying to make our house appealing.

Thanks everyone. If it had just been freshly painted walls and one air freshener, I wouldn't have been worried. However, the air fresheners were in every room, and very strong.

I'll have a think today. I'd be so upset if damp and mould were uncovered weeks later.

@Popquizzer and @Yyfandes - I would have preferred the smoker or dog smell (despite being a non-smoker and not having dogs)! Now, I'm worried about bidding on a flat with damp issues.

How long has the property been on the market? If it's just gone on, I'd view again in a week or so. Lots of people do paint a property more neutral in order to sell, so it's not 100% a red flag in itself.

Likewise, some people just have air fresheners going a lot. They might have only turned them on to cover the paint smell, so it could be innocent. If they're still on when you review, I'd question that.

@BarbaricPeach It's only just come on the market. I was the first person to view it. Thanks for the advice, I'll ask for a second viewing (without air fresheners if possible). I'll also see if anyone from the other flats is around. If yes, I'll ask if there are any issues with damp/mould (or anything else that's a red flag).

I'm overly cautious as I'm a solo buyer and this would be my first home.

There could be many reasons:

• damp
• a smoker lived in the flat or someone with pets
• the air fresheners are to make sure it does not smell too much of paint.

It is very common though to try to refresh a property by painting the walls before putting it on sale so it is not necessarily hiding something.

I prefer the smell of damp to the stink of air fresheners (or pets). I'd suspect damp, heavy smokers, smelly pets, or any combination of the foregoing.
Paint smells I can live with, but I would be concerned if I got both paint smells and air fresheners. It sounds most likely like damp to me.
Paint smells should disperse in a week, or two at most even if gloss. Air freesheners would not mask a paint smell, they'd just add to it and make the unhealthy stench of the air fresheners worse (as you found). They should have done any painting and got rid of the smell before going onto the market. If it still smells of paint when you go back, that really is fishy- they may be overpainting mold again and again.
We had a surveyor survey a house for us, he said to me afterwards that when he got there they told him that they had just shampooed the carpets in the downstairs rooms- this meant he couldn't check for damp properly. He explained this is the sort of tip dimwitted vendors get from their mates down the pub- 'have the carpets shampooed, mate, and then the surveyor's dampmeter won't work properly'. He said he therefore concluded that the house was damp.
There were other indicators too.
We didn't buy the house- but we'd actually have bought it if they'd been honest about the damp (and other things). Own goal, there.

It's interesting that the issue of smoking cropped up w.r.t. decorating.
Our house had minor damp problems, including smell to some degree, and there's no doubt that getting rid of the wallpaper was one of the things that sorted that out. But the smell was an odd one, especially when the paper was wet and being stripped, and did seem to vary a bit from room to room- more in the living rooms. Some of the smell was undoubtedly damp, but there was also a rather nasty bitter-smelling aspect of it I didn't associate with damp. Clearly not the plaster (I know what that smells like wet) or anything else I know of, so I assumed it was just part of the damp smell, maybe some mold within the paste or paper that wasn't visible in itself. On reflection, and reading this thread, I think maybe there was a heavy smoker in the past. I'm happy to say that this very day we got rid of the last of the ruddy wallpaper bar some that's gloss-painted (and therefore doesn't smell) in the utility.

I don't like air fresheners. They're not healthy, and to my nose don't mask any smell, they just add to it; some of them smell to me even worse than damp.

@BlueMongoose agreed! One scented candle would have been sufficient!

You can get cheap humidity checkers to take along to check - 50% is ideal, 60ish normal for old house in winter, knocking on 70 and over would worry me.

amzn.eu/d/5IqAe0l

"Victorian house converted into flats. The windows are single-glazed."

I used to live in a flat exactly like that and no matter what they did the mould would come back. Once the landlord sent a bricklayer and he nearly destroyed the whole of an external wall just to try to find a possible source of infiltration that could be causing water to drip from the walls (it wasn't a leak from above as we were top floor). We used to call it "the crying wall". We ended up moving at the end because my son has asthma and I had a cough that lasted 3 months.

I'd stay as far away as I possibly could if I were you.

I've lived in several single glazed Victorian houses (one was converted into flats). They've all had damp and mildew, and the one that was flats was worst - possibly because the conversion had reduced air circulation around the property

It's quite normal to paint before selling, isn't it?

The paint wouldn't concern me necessarily. The blasting air fresheners are a huge red flag.