After reading some posts on cat smells, I thought I would share some details about the cats in and around my recent Florida house.
When we first viewed the house, the urine smell in an addition was oppressive. It was so bad that the Realtor who showed us the house had to walk outside. After leaving, my clothes reeked of cat urine, and several days later, I could still smell it in the car during the long drive home. Amazingly, we never saw a cat while viewing the house. I'm pretty sure the smell (and maybe the obvious termite damage) led to the reduced sale price.
After closing, my wife went down to kick off the rehab on the house. When she arrived, the fleas in and around the house were rabid, and she saw "lots of cats" in the yard. She contacted an exterminator, but he wouldn't treat the house until the cats were gone. So she spent the next several days catching feral cats and delivering them to the local pound (they wouldn't trap them for us). In the end, she caught 28 cats, couldn't catch one, and one other disappeared -- it was sickly and likely didn't make it after the food stopped.
We'll work on the odor as soon as the demo is finished in the addition; it has some stick-on vinyl tile that still need to be removed first.
Interestingly, I met a neighbor while at the house over the holidays. She said that the woman who previously lived in the house was very nice and that she had two cute cats...
