Swayed by a Home’s Feng Shui

Nerissa Rosete fell in love with a pricey South Orange County home, especially its impressive view of the mountains. She entered escrow, putting $20,000 down.

But she walked away from the deal, losing half her down payment, after a consultant noted the way the backyard steeply dropped off to meet Interstate 5. It was, he warned her, bad feng shui: The receding yard would prompt energy to rush out of the home.

Once again, the 3,000-year-old Chinese practice of feng shui, which teaches manipulation of one’s physical surroundings to bring about balance and success, had shaken up the real estate market.

Nearly every real estate office in Southern California seems to have a tale about how buyers or sellers, including a large proportion of non-Chinese, have made surprising compromises in pursuit of good feng shui.

One sign is the rapidly growing field of feng shui consulting. Other signals include transactions like Rosete’s that are falling through when a consultant vetoes a home. Some deals are taking longer to close because of buyer demands for a feng shui inspection. Some feng shui consultants are issuing certificates that sellers can use to prove a home’s worthiness.

A number of resentful real estate agents find this all too much. “A bunch of baloney,” sneers one in Beverly Hills. But he, like other critics, asks for anonymity, aware his next buyer could insist on a feng shui-correct house. On the record, he puts it this way: “I would definitely lose business if I were not trying to accommodate people and their concerns.”

The agents know that feng shui’s rising popularity is propelled not only by an expanding pool of Asian home buyers but also by a growing acceptance of the practice among many age groups and ethnicities.

Feng shui has penetrated the public consciousness so much so that it’s nothing for Nordstrom to use the term in a TV ad. And a column that runs every other week in this newspaper’s real estate section has given advice about the practice for more than a year.

Feng shui (pronounced “fung shway”) translates as wind and water. It teaches that remodeling, rearranging furniture or adding objects to an environment will reawaken positive energy, or chi. Practitioners claim free-flowing chi helps people achieve prosperity, good health and happiness in life.

Feng shui consultants charge anywhere from $150 to a few thousand dollars an hour, usually spending at least several hours at a site. They enjoy a level of devotion from some buyers and sellers usually reserved for celebrated hairdressers or designers.

Even after Nerissa Rosete lost money pulling out of that home deal in Orange County’s exclusive Nellie Gail Ranch, she relied on her consultant in choosing a second house with a sale price of about $900,000.

Her consultant warned her that the property, which was across the street from the first house, wasn’t perfect either. The living room and the foyer would need to be extended to move the front door away from the stairwell. Energy loss was again the problem: Without the changes, it would escape down the stairs and out the doorway. The home’s U shape also drew criticism: It meant the place was lacking a heart. Feng shui deems rectangular homes the ideal shape.

Rosete, a medical lab owner married to a veterinarian, OKd the changes--even though they eventually cost her an extra $1.3 million.

“I didn’t realize the remodel would cost that much,” said Rosete, who said she became familiar with feng shui while growing up in the Philippines. “But it’s worth it.”

Rosete, like many feng shui adherents, believes good energy flow in her environment at home influences her success at work. “I think the house has backed us up a lot,” she said. “I think if I hadn’t redone the house I would have gone bankrupt.”

Consultants say many Asians are willing to spend heavily to make a home conform to feng shui ideals. “But [most] Americans aren’t ready to do that yet,” said Suzee Miller, a feng shui design consultant in Irvine.

Some Western feng shui users are unnerved by the practice’s intrusion into their private lives, saying they didn’t feel comfortable in their own home after they moved things around on a practitioner’s advice.

“I had my house feng shuied, but I moved everything back because I like my stuff where it is,” said Sheida Hodge, an intercultural consultant who has written a book on feng shui for real estate agents.

A Remedy for That Hard-to-Sell House

One of the most notable tendencies among U.S.-born devotees of feng shui is to use it in an effort to jump-start stalled real estate transactions.

Real estate agent Barb Webber was skeptical the first time a client suggested to her that a hard-to-sell house would move if it were vetted by a feng shui consultant. To her surprise, she said, it did. A few months later, Webber called the same consultant to evaluate a Fountain Valley home that had been on the market for more than a year.

The consultant’s diagnosis: When the previous owners moved out of the $338,000 house, they took its energy with them. To counteract this (and take advantage of the fact that the family’s furniture was still in the house), Webber took children’s clothes and crayons and put them on the bed in the kids’ room.

She also bought stoneware turtles and put them outside in the home’s “marriage sector.” She filled a bowl with water, added rocks and placed it by the energy-draining stairway that faced the front door. She asked the woman of the house to bring some clothes back to the house and hang them in the bedroom closet. She placed silk and fresh flowers inside and outside the house and rebuilt a fence along the property line.

Then she raised the home’s price. It sold a week later, she said. Webber attributes the quick sale to feng shui.

But in cases like these, agents agree that it can be difficult to determine whether a house sold quickly because of feng shui or because the Southland’s real estate market is so hot that most properties don’t sit for long in any event.

Webber, who spent $1,650 on the consultation and remedies, concedes that many of the changes she made to the house, such as fixing the sagging fence and adding flowers, were just common sense.

Many consultants said they started practicing feng shui after they experienced real estate problems of their own. Angel Thompson, an astrologer and feng shui practitioner in Venice, said she became a believer after a feng shui consultant helped sell Thompson’s home, which had been on the market for more than two years.

The advice: He told her to tear up paperwork for the home and to go with her real estate agent at a specific time on a specific day to the yard’s southeast corner--considered an auspicious area--and reposition the “for sale” sign. She paid him $2,500 for the advice. The house sold soon after in a cash deal to a buyer who “didn’t know anything about feng shui,” Thompson said.

Agents’ Patience Put to the Test

While some real estate agents welcome the practice’s apparent effects, others say their patience has been tested by buyers who prolong house hunts for months in the name of feng shui.

Deborah Clark and her husband relied on their personal knowledge of feng shui when they passed on a house she loved in the Hollywood Hills. It was at a T intersection, which according to feng shui means the house will be overwhelmed by energy flowing down the street. Clark, who owns a company with her husband that does artwork for movie ads, said it took her six more months to find a place she liked as much.

Arcadia real estate agent Bosco Wong said homes at a T intersection are often sold at prices up to 10% lower than others in the same neighborhood.

Buyer Jeff Greenberg, who heads a company that compiles soundtracks for movies, vetoed several homes on the Westside and Hollywood Hills on the advice of his $150-a-visit consultant, Kartar Diamond. He’s still looking for the perfect Spanish- or Mediterranean-style house with good feng shui.

In turn, many real estate firms have hired feng shui consultants to school their agents on working with buyers who adhere to the Chinese philosophy. Sample dilemma: How does an agent know when to bring up feng shui, such as asking whether a client wants to employ it?

“Americans as buyers are very frightened to tell the agent that they know anything about feng shui,” said consultant Miller, referring to the stigma attached to the practice in the U.S. by many who view feng shui as hocus-pocus. “So they will go out once or twice with an agent, and if they don’t see anything they like they will drop the agent and get someone else,” without the agent’s ever knowing why.

For a decade, home builders have hired consultants to review construction sites and blueprints for projects in Asian enclaves. Some developers say they’re incorporating feng shui design today into projects in non-Asian communities.

“A feng shui-correct house turns out to be good architecture,” said Angi Ma Wong, a veteran feng shui practitioner who was among the first to advise builders. “Builders found they were selling more to everyone because they were paying attention to feng shui.”

Rielly Homes recently called on Wong to review plans for a development in West Covina. She suggested several changes to each of the four floor plans offered for the area.

These changes included eliminating sharp edges--thought to promote negative energy--including a star pattern in the flooring and on wrought-iron railings. She also suggested getting rid of overhead beams--which she said provided a negative downward pressure--and replacing them with arches.

George R. Rielly, the project manager for the development, said he asked architects to incorporate these changes--among others suggested--into the drawings for the homes.

There are plenty of feng shui consultants for agents and builders to call--by some estimates, upward of 300 in Southern California. Some veterans say there’s also a growing number of poorly trained consultants looking to make a quick buck.

“It’s becoming popularized to the point where it’s almost ridiculous,” said Chris Shaul, co-founder of 168 Feng Shui Advisors in Burbank. “Now people are taking weekend classes and going out and practicing.”

Consultant Thompson said she was hired to redo homes belonging to members of a local women’s group 18 months after they followed advice given by the original consultant to put horse troughs in their backyards--even though they didn’t own horses. The remedy, apparently intended to increase wealth through water, had no obvious effect.

Diamond said she worked with a couple who were advised by another practitioner that they could keep their neighbors from harassing them if they urinated around their property line.

The founders of the Western feng shui movement say examples such as this, in addition to extreme advice such as to cancel escrow, give the practice a bad rap.

“We don’t have any standards, so it’s easy to mislead people,” said Larry Sang, founder of the American Feng Shui Institute in Monterey Park and one of the pioneers of the movement in the U.S. “More than 90% of the books out there say to hang a mirror to refract the bad energy, when scientifically we know that doesn’t work.”

Ultimately, feng shui’s advocates say, its impact on real estate sales will continue to grow. Thompson predicts an increase in the use of certificates of authenticity by some practitioners.

“People will jump on this authenticity bandwagon and start offering houses and saying they’re feng shui correct and charging more money,” she said.