Feng Shui Staging

Feng shui staging

When Benson suggested using feng shui to stage the Winfield home, the owners weren't immediately accepting of the idea.

"I was somewhat skeptical. My husband was more so," Winfield said.

At its heart, feng shui staging involves adjusting a place's energy and enhancing the perception of space, often done by reconsidering furniture placement, said Christine Ayres, who staged the Winfields' home and also co-wrote the book "Sell Your Home with Feng Shui."

It's a technique that has been around for hundreds -- and some say thousands -- of years. And while the concept has long thrived in China, only recently has it been embraced in the United States.

A home with a good flow of energy is one that makes someone feel comfortable immediately, Ayres said; a home without it, on some level, makes a person want to leave. Feng shui also can be used to create a clear path to a home's "room of first impression," the room that will make the biggest impact on a buyer, Ayres added.

"Most Realtors are very open to it. They're going to use any tool possible to help market the property," she said. There's also little cost involved.

Some tips for those who want to try using feng shui to sell their home:

• Furniture shouldn't be placed in the direct path of the entrance of the room, said Cynthia Chomos, a feng shui consultant, speaker, teacher and founder of the Feng Shui School for Real Estate Sales in Seattle. For example, if the back of a couch faces a room's entrance, the piece of furniture can cause a person to "ping pong" back to the door, Ayres said.
• Chomos also advised having a solid wall of support behind a key piece of furniture -- a rule that makes it a bad idea to place a bed under a bedroom window.
• The front door, "the mouth of the house," should get special attention because "it's where the house inhales its vitality and brings in the buyer," Ayres said. Spruce it up with a fresh coat of paint, replace scratched hardware or frame the door with matching pots, which has the visual effect of widening the door, she said.
• If potted plants flank the house, the plants shouldn't have sharp, pointed leaves, Chomos said. A plant such as a palm can appear aggressive and ward off buyers. "The last thing we want are sharp points pointing at (a buyer's) stomach," she said.
• Ayres also suggests hanging a wind chime at the front, right corner of the home. That area is the buyer's area, she said, where decisions regarding the sale might be made.

The feng shui techniques used by the Winfields "opened the house up a lot," Winfield said. However, she still isn't sure she's a feng shui believer.

But Benson, her Realtor, is. After the success of two sales with feng shui makeovers, she applied the concepts to her own home.

Emotional check

Some say other factors holding a home back from a sale are those that can't be seen.

Negative events such as bankruptcies, divorces and health problems leave negative energy in the walls of a home, Chomos said. So she does space-clearing techniques that get the home back to neutral and ready for new occupants.

The home Winfield was trying to sell was filled with memories, including her son's graduation from high school and the family dog's illness. And while she and her husband, who decided to move to Colorado for a job, knew the area in which they'd be living, they hadn't yet bought a new home.

"I don't think I realized I was holding on to it," she said.

As a symbolic gesture that helped her let go, Winfield took a few crumbles of foundation from the old home and tossed them into the Colorado River, near where they were moving.

Divine intervention

The act of burying a statue of a saint for a home sale can easily be viewed as superstition.

But for Stephen Binz, another home seller who struggled to get an offer, the ritual became more of a prayer. Binz is the author of "St. Joseph, My Real Estate Agent." He spends the first chapter of the book explaining how the process helped him, and he focuses the book on how the saint can be an inspiration to those in the transitional process of moving.

"If a person believes that by saying certain words or performing a certain action something is going to occur, that's superstition," he said. "But appealing to a saint is an act of devotion."

Seven days after he buried the statue as directed -- upside down in the yard -- he had an offer.

After the home is sold, the statue is supposed to reside in a place of honor in the seller's new home. At the Winfields' new home, St. Joseph sits in the kitchen window.

While to some this process may seem a far-fetched idea, there might not be as many doubting Thomases out there as one might think.

According to Phil Cates, owner of the online retailer StJosephStatue.com, sales of figurine kits have risen about 100% every year since 2004. For $9.95, the statue comes with a burial bag and an instructional booklet, all packaged in a cotton tote bag with an image of St. Joseph on it, Cates said.

Orders to the Modesto, Calif., company come from across the country, although states with troubled markets -- including Florida, Michigan and Ohio -- seem to be ordering the most nowadays, he said. Believers and skeptics are invited to submit their stories on the Web site.

But when customers call Cates, who also is a mortgage professional, he often gives them a dose of market reality with their prayerful purchase. (The company's phone number, by the way, is 888-BURY-JOE.)

"They need attractive pricing, and you have to start thinking like a home builder and give incentives," he said. "It's important that people know, that they don't have rose-colored glasses on. They need to know what they're faced with."