Guides · Selling · 15 min read · Updated September 2026

Selling a house

The tradition read a house as a record of the people who had lived in it, and a buyer in Hong Kong or Vancouver still does. What a house with a history is and how the market prices it; the buyer’s first ten minutes and the six faults their practitioner sees; the numbers, floors and dates that move a price and by how much; the afternoon of fixes that costs a screen; the leaving as the manuals kept it; and what the staging research says a buyer actually feels.

Oriented NW 300°

Metal

Fig. 01 Keys at a front door. The tradition handed a house over swept, cold and open, and the buyer’s practitioner reads it from the threshold.

The site’s guides are written for the person who lives in a house, and this one is for the person leaving it. The tradition took a sale seriously in a way the modern market has kept: a house carried the fortune of its last household into its next, a buyer read it in the first minutes from the door, and a number on the gate or a death in a bedroom moved its price. The research has since measured how much. This guide gives the house with a history and what the market makes of it, the buyer’s first ten minutes and the six faults their practitioner will see, the afternoon of fixes that costs nothing, the leaving as the manuals kept it, and what the evidence says a staged room does to a buyer.

The house with a history

The yang-house manuals treat a house as a thing with a past. A house that has prospered is a good house, a house whose households have failed is suspect, and a house in which someone has died by violence or by their own hand is a xiong zhai, an inauspicious house, which the manuals would not have a family enter without rites and which a buyer today avoids at a discount the market can measure. Emmons’s survey of Hong Kong in the early 1990s found the belief general and unembarrassed: buyers asked what had happened in a flat before they asked about the plumbing, and the agents kept lists. Bhattacharya, Huang and Nielsen put the Hong Kong data through a regression in 2021 and found the discount on a flat where a death had occurred at about a fifth of its price, with a smaller discount spilling to the other flats on the same floor and a smaller one again to the block, which is the tradition’s idea that a house’s fortune is shared by its neighbours, priced. The seller of an ordinary house has none of this to fear, and should know that the buyer’s question is the tradition’s and is asked in earnest: what happened here, and who did well. Bruun’s masters in rural China answered it from the village’s memory, and a seller who can answer it, the children raised, the business that grew, the marriage made in the front room, is selling a good house in the tradition’s terms before a compass is out. Knapp records the same reading in the houses themselves, in the couplets over a door that name the household’s generations, and a house that has kept its couplets is a house with a history it can show.

The buyer’s ten minutes

Fig. 01 The same flat before and after the afternoon a seller spends on it, and none of it costs more than a screen. A: the six faults a buyer’s practitioner sees in the first ten minutes, which are the six the site’s room guides teach. The front door’s line runs straight through the living room to the balcony door, the through-hall fault; a mirror on the hall wall faces the front door and sends the arriving buyer back out; boxes stand in the entrance; the sofa has its back to the door; the stove stands against the sink; and the bed lies with its head under the bedroom window, with the door out of its sight. B: a screen and a plant turn the door’s line; the mirror goes to the side wall, where it doubles the window; the entrance is bare to the mat; the sofa is turned to the wall with the door in its view; a chopping board sits between the stove and the sink; and the bed goes to the solid wall with the door seen from the pillow. A buyer who knows nothing of feng shui reads B as a bigger, calmer flat, which is what the staging research finds people feel; a buyer’s practitioner reads it as a flat with nothing to report. The six fixes are the command position, the mirror rule, the door’s line, the fire-and-water rule and the clear entrance, each with its own guide on the site. The plan is drawn without the seller’s furniture beyond the pieces that matter, which is also the advice: a buyer should see the room, not the household.

A buyer who brings a practitioner, and in Hong Kong, Singapore and Vancouver many do, will get a reading that begins on the pavement and is largely made by the time the door has closed, and a seller can know in advance what it will say, because it is the reading the site’s room guides teach. The approach is read first: what faces the door, a road ending at it, a lamp-post or a corner of the building opposite, which the sha essay catalogues, and what a seller cannot change but can soften with a hedge or a light. The door is read next, for what a buyer sees when it opens: a straight line through the flat to a window or a balcony door, the through-hall fault, which sends the qi and the eye out of the far side of the house; a mirror facing the door, which sends the buyer back out; a floor of boxes, which the clutter guide reads as the sign of a household in trouble. The first room is read for its seats, the sofa with its back to the door which no one in the tradition would sit on; the kitchen for the stove against the sink, the fire-and-water fault the kitchen page draws; the bedroom for the bed, under a window, in the door’s line, with a mirror on it. The drawing above gives the six on one plan, before and after an afternoon that costs a screen and a plant. A practitioner who finds nothing to report writes a short report, and a buyer who reads a short report pays the asking price. Alexander’s pattern language, which knows nothing of feng shui, asks a house to give the same first minutes, an entrance transition, a room with light on two sides, a seat with its back protected, and the two vocabularies agree on what the buyer feels.

Design observation · Staging is the command position for the buyer’s eye

The staging trade has its own rules, and a designer notices that most of them are the tradition’s. Clear the entrance; take down the family photographs so that the buyer can put their own in; turn the sofa to face the door; open the curtains; take the bed away from the window; put a bowl of fruit on the kitchen table and nothing on the counter. Each is a command-position rule or a clutter rule with the buyer in the chair instead of the household. The one rule the trade has that the tradition does not is to depersonalise, and even that has a form in the manuals, which had the old household carry its gods out before the new one came in. A seller who has read the site’s room guides has read a staging manual with better sources.

Numbers, floors and dates

Fig. 02 What the research has measured of feng shui in a sale price, on one scale. A flat in Hong Kong where a death has occurred, a xiong zhai, sells for about a fifth less than its neighbours, and Bhattacharya, Huang and Nielsen found the discount spilling to the other flats on its floor and, smaller, to the block. A house number ending in four in the Chinese neighbourhoods of Vancouver sold for two per cent less and one ending in eight for two and a half per cent more, and Fortin, Hill and Huang found no such effect in the neighbourhoods where Chinese buyers were few, which Bourassa and Peng had found in Auckland fifteen years before. Staging, in the experiment Lane, Seiler and Seiler ran with photographs of the same room furnished and bare, changed how liveable buyers thought the room was and did not change what they said they would pay. The numbers are the size of the tradition in the market: large for a death, small for a number, and nothing where the buyers do not hold the belief. Chau, Ma and Ho found a premium for flats on Hong Kong floors with an eight in 2001, and Shum, Sun and Wu one in Chengdu in 2014; both were premiums of a few per cent that grew in a rising market. The figures are averages over thousands of sales, and a single sale can go either way.

The tradition’s numbers are in the price, and the research says by how much. A house number ending in eight in the Chinese neighbourhoods of Vancouver sold for two and a half per cent more than its neighbours and one ending in four for two per cent less, in Fortin, Hill and Huang’s study of a decade of sales, and neither effect existed in the neighbourhoods where Chinese buyers were few, which Bourassa and Peng had found in Auckland in 1999: the premium follows the buyers, not the number. Chau, Ma and Ho found a premium on Hong Kong floors with an eight in them, and Shum, Sun and Wu one in Chengdu, and both found it larger in a rising market, when buyers can afford a belief, than in a falling one. The numbers essay gives the numbers themselves; the seller needs three conclusions. A house on a lucky number in a neighbourhood of buyers who hold the belief is worth a little more, and the agent should say so; a house on an unlucky one is worth a little less to those buyers, and the seller can apply to the council to change it, which Vancouver and Hong Kong owners do; and outside those neighbourhoods the number is worth nothing either way. The dates follow the same logic. The almanac has a heading for a contract and a heading for leaving a house, and the choosing a day essay explains how they are read; a seller in a market of buyers who consult it should not set a completion on a day the almanac marks for breaking, and should not be surprised when a buyer asks to move it. The rest of the calendar the tradition kept, no sale in the year of a mourning, no move in the seventh month, is the buyer’s to keep, and a seller who knows it can plan a listing round it.

Fig. 03 What the tradition is worth in a price, drawn against a zero line, with the studies that measured it. Only two of the nine rows have a published figure and they are the two the trade never mentions: a Hong Kong flat in which someone had died sold for about a fifth less than its neighbours, and a Vancouver address ending in four sold for about two per cent less in the neighbourhoods where Chinese buyers were many, one ending in eight for about two and a half per cent more. Three rows are directions without a figure here: the discount on a haunted flat spilling smaller to the rest of the floor and smaller again to the block, and the premium on a floor numbered with an eight, which Chau found in Hong Kong and Shum in Chengdu and both found larger in a rising market than in a falling one. Three rows are zero. The same digits in the suburbs where Chinese buyers were few moved nothing, in Vancouver and in Auckland before it; staging a room changed what buyers felt about a house and not what they said they would pay; and the object by the door has never been measured by anybody, because no study has gone looking for it. The tradition is in the price, and it is in the history of the room and the number on the gate, neither of which an object touches. Bhattacharya, Huang and Nielsen 2021; Fortin, Hill and Huang 2014; Bourassa and Peng 1999; Chau, Ma and Ho 2001; Shum, Sun and Wu 2014; Lane, Seiler and Seiler 2015. The bars are the published central estimates and the open marks are effects the studies establish in direction without a figure given here. Every one of them is a fact about buyers, not about houses.

The drawing puts every measured effect on one scale, and the scale is the argument. Two rows have a published figure and they are the two a seller is least often told about: the fifth off a flat where someone died, which is the largest number anyone has found in this literature by a factor of eight, and the two per cent either way on the last digit of an address. Three rows are directions without a figure, the spillover to the floor and the block and the premium on a floor with an eight. And three rows are zero: the same digits where the buyers who hold the belief are few, which is Bourassa and Peng’s Auckland finding and Fortin’s Vancouver control; the staging, which changed everything about how the buyers felt and nothing about what they said they would pay; and the object by the door, which is at zero not because a study found nothing but because no study has gone looking. A seller reading the chart from the top learns the order of the things that matter, and none of them is bought.

Selling, in order

Know the house’s story. What went well in it, in a sentence; a buyer who holds the tradition will ask, and a house with a good answer is a good house.
Walk the approach as a stranger. What faces the door, what the door opens onto; a hedge, a light and a bare floor for the things that can be changed.
Break the door’s line. A screen, a console with a plant, a rug across it: the through-hall fault is the fault most often reported and the cheapest to fix.
Move the mirrors. Off the wall facing the door, off the wall facing the bed; onto a side wall where they double a window.
Give every seat a wall. Sofa, desk chair and bed with a wall behind and the door in view; the command position for the buyer’s eye.
Separate fire and water. A board between the stove and the sink; the hood clean; nothing on the counter.
Clear the entrance and the corners. Boxes out, the floor bare, the corners of every room visible; the buyer should see the room, not the household.
Check the number and the date. In a neighbourhood of buyers who hold the belief, a change of house number is worth applying for, and a completion day worth choosing.
Leave it the tradition’s way. Swept, aired, cold stove, door open for the handover; the next household lights its own fire.