Five Simple Tips for Selling your Home with Feng Shui
Photo credit Unsplash Scott Webb
You might be familiar with feng shui as a tool to optimize the space you live in, but did you know you can also use feng shui principles to sell your home? Whether you’re planning to sell your own home, or you’re a stager or broker who works with properties for sale, you can use some simple feng shui tips to your advantage. In this post, we’re sharing five simple, universal tips that are a great starting point for any property. However, it’s important to note that feng shui is a very complex practice, and some homes are very unique and may require extra attention or extra adjustments. If you are looking for a more personalized approach, it’s always best to work with a qualified feng shui consultant, like one of our graduates.
While this isn’t a comprehensive list, here are our top five feng shui tips for selling your home:
Look at the front door.
In feng shui, we look at life force energy, called qi. This qi flows all around the home and the surrounding environment, and it’s very important that qi can flow smoothly without any obstruction at the front door. If you’re planning to sell your home, imagine a potential buyer walking up to your front door. What would they observe? Try walking up to the door with fresh eyes and see what you notice. Observe how you move. Is approaching the front door a pleasant experience? Is it chaotic? Look out for too many hard, straight lines, abrupt turns, and uneven walkways. Is there healthy foliage near the home’s entrance, or does it feel lifeless? If you do notice abrupt turns or an uneven walkway, you can create several small areas of interest along the way to the front door. For example, you can add outdoor lighting, rock gardens, planters, or seating. Most importantly, the front door needs to be easy to find. One easy fix is to make sure the door is freshly painted and as visible as possible. Here are a few of our favorite feng shui-inspired front door colors:
Red or purple for prosperity
Green or teal for vitality
Yellow or ochre for health
Black, charcoal, or very dark blue for career
Whichever color you choose, a freshly painted front door will do a lot to improve the experience and the qi of the front door when you’re selling a home.
Notice what you see first.
When you walk in the home, what’s the first thing you see? Again, try to approach this with fresh eyes. Try clearing your head, maybe going for a walk, and then enter the home with awareness. Notice the first thing your eye is drawn to. Is it a beautiful piece of art or furniture that’s pleasing to the eye? Or is it something that is meaningful to the current owners, but noteworthy in a not-so-positive way to visitors? You don’t want potential buyers to remember that one odd thing about the home. Instead, you want them to have an overall feeling of positive energy. Getting past that first impression can be hard, so this is a really important factor to consider. To create a positive first impression, you could add a large plant in a nice, neutral pot or a striking piece of art near the front entrance. When it comes to art, we would suggest choosing something that’s colorful and interesting, and not so generic that it looks cheap. Abstracted landscapes in pleasing colors are generally a safe bet.
Notice any inauspicious roads or surrounding design details.
Looking at roadways, waterways, and the surrounding environment can be a little bit of a challenge, especially for a non-practitioner. This does require a certain level of expertise, so this is where you’ll probably want to bring in a feng shui expert. If you're having difficulty selling your home, some of the things we look for are fast-moving qi from oncoming traffic, like a T-intersection, or stagnant qi on a cul-de-sac. We are always looking at the quality of qi. If you do have one of these challenging situations, you can invest in landscaping and curb appeal, bringing more life energy to the space. Overall, a well-landscaped home can correct many issues. Shrubs, boulders, and outdoor lighting are great places to start, and these can help to create a sense of safety and security for the home. If you work with a feng shui consultant, they can tell you where to put these things based on your particular layout, and you can also try to add more movement to your outdoor space with things like kinetic sculptures or water fixtures, which can help to soften any aggressive qi that may be coming towards your home from the inauspicious roads and surroundings.
Balance the five elements.
If you’re not familiar with the five elements, these are part of the overall energetic system of feng shui. The five elements represent five different flavors or characteristics of qi, and they are based on things found in nature. The five elements are wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, and you can bring these five elements into your space with color, shape, texture, or materials. The way these elements show up tells a story to potential buyers about the home, even if they are not consciously aware of it. Too much of one element or too little of another can hold the home back or make the home seem uncomfortable to a potential buyer. This is another area where working with a consultant can be helpful, since balancing the five elements can get a little complex. If you want to explore this, you can listen to some of our podcast episodes about the five elements, like this one.
Without diving too deeply here, there are a few colors that you want to look out for because large amounts of them can be overpowering. First, notice if there is a lot of red or bright orange. These colors represent the fire element, which is a very dynamic energy, and this can sometimes throw people off. In general, it’s best to use red in small, specific ways. You may also want to avoid too much black, which is water qi, and this can sometimes make people feel a little bit too introspective. Like red, black should be used mindfully. White is metal qi, and too much white can come across as cold and rigid. Greens, teals, and mid-tone blues represent wood qi, and these tend to be good choices when you’re approaching a space more generically, as wood qi has a vitality that is welcoming to most people. Also, adding a bit of wood qi can help to create more balance if you do have a space that has more fire, water, or metal energy. An easy way to incorporate wood qi into a space is to add a plant.
Release your home and cut energetic ties.
This last tip is really about your mindset and the invisible connections that we have to our spaces, especially our homes. These connections can be especially powerful for a home where a family has lived for a long time and experienced many milestones. It can be difficult to part ways with a home that holds on to so many memories, both good and bad. If multiple people are living in this home, it’s also possible that you’ve cut your ties but someone else who is living there is not yet ready. It’s important to acknowledge that, because that can tie you to the home and prevent it from being sold.
So, how can you release your home? You could write a letter to the home and have a farewell party for it. This is a good way to prepare the home for the new owners. If you find that someone in the home is not ready to let go, it’s important that they participate in this, but you also don’t want to force anyone. Everyone should join of their own volition. You can also practice setting a mindful intention and visualize that the home is happy with its new owners and that you’re opening the qi of the home to other people. There is a fine line here, though: make sure you’re not too set on the home going to a specific type of family. Setting parameters really narrows down your ability to let go of the home, so just visualize that there are new owners, and leave the details for the universe to fill in.
We hope that these tips help you if you’re selling a home you own or if you work in the real estate business. If you try these suggestions and you feel the house is still stuck, we really recommend working with a qualified feng shui practitioner. Our graduates can help you with all of the tips we mentioned above, and they can also help you with space clearing and other transcendental methods that will help you cut ties with your home on a deeper, energetic level, giving you the best opportunity to sell the home.