The 5-Star Recipe That Could Help You Sell Your Home

By Allaire Conte

August 30, 2025

For the first time in a long time, homeowners are having trouble selling.

Delistings surged over the summer: For every 100 new listings that hit the market, 21 were pulled. Rather than accept lower offers, frustrated sellers are opting to pull their homes off the market altogether, in what Realtor.com® senior economist Jake Krimmel is calling a “cruel summer.”

It’s just one sign of the shifting power dynamics, as the housing market transitions from years of seller dominance to conditions that are increasingly buyer-friendly. For sellers, that means the bar is higher than it’s been in years. Some are even turning to more creative tactics to catch buyers’ attention.

A comment on a now-viral New York Times Cooking recipe suggests that a fix may be as simple as whipping up a quick confection. The Original Plum Torte has racked up over 18,000 reviews and a solid five-star rating—not just for taste, but apparently for its real estate magic.

“Alas, my house wasn’t selling,” one commenter wrote about their 1988 home sale. “I’d read that the fragrance of baking helps so I bought a frozen loaf of bread, and warmed it in the oven. No sale. Desperate, I baked this torte for an open house. Ta-dah! With the kitchen infused with the sweet perfume of the Original Plum Torte, the house sold.”

As an avid baker and a real estate reporter, I was intrigued. So I set out to understand the power of the plum torte.

Why smell sells: The science behind the strategy

Scent has long been a secret weapon in retail, with a booming $3.6 billion scent marketing industry built around one simple truth: Smell is a powerful trigger for memory and emotion.

The idea gained traction in the early 1990s, when neurologist Alan Hirsch found that the presence of a floral scent boosted Nike customers’ intent to purchase by up to 84%. Today, brands from Cinnabon to Samsung use custom fragrances to spark emotional responses and build deeper associations with their products.

Unlike sight or sound, which are routed through the thalamus, scent connects directly to the amygdala (which processes emotion) and the hippocampus (which stores memory). That connection explains why a familiar smell can instantly bring back a long-forgotten moment, and why scent-triggered memories are often more emotional and vivid than those sparked by other senses.

Scent marketing leverages those connections.

A signature smell “will just create that kind of bonding in your head ... so that when you think of that brand, you think of that smell, or when you think of the smell, it elicits very positive emotions,” Tianyi Zhang, a doctoral candidate in experimental psychology at the University of Oxford, explained to Atlas Obscura last year.

It’s something that real estate agents have long known and tapped into.

“We have a proprietary scent, which we created with a local candle maker in Miami,” says Christopher Wands with Douglas Elliman. “Sensory tools like smell are huge influences on buyers, although they may not realize it.”

In other words, a plum torte might not just make a house smell like home—it might also make buyers feel like it’s already theirs.