I’m going out on a limb here, I know, but bear with me.
After going into hundreds of houses, both for my own acquisitions AND through all the Field Trips I’ve held in the past*, I know that each property has it’s own energy. If you haven’t felt it, you haven’t been in enough houses.
When I first shopped foreclosures in California, I felt sorry for the families that made their house a real home. Poems and prayers about love and family painted on the walls in a child’s room, the marks as on the walls as the children grew, and the amateur decoration attempted by the DIY (do-it-yourself) homemaker were throughout many houses I viewed. It was heartbreaking for me knowing these people’s lives were upset, and possibly ruined. True, I was looking for a real estate deal, but I never forgot the families that were up-rooted from their homes. We lived in very hard times when I first started my investing.
But there was nothing worse than some of the properties I viewed in Chicago. I would walk into some of the houses in the South side of Chicago and there was an immediate “icky” feeling. Sometimes it was so bad I wouldn’t event attempt to venture into the basements. Some houses were worse than others and you couldn’t define it. It was an “icky” feeling, and often times I couldn’t wait to get out of that house.
When you think about what happened in these houses, you know there was pain, heartache, possibly families separated with irreparable outcomes. But think about some of these houses in the Midwest. These are brick homes built over a century ago, often times passed down from generation to generation, and then suffered foreclosure.
This is not just about the Midwest, as I’ve felt these same issues in Florida, Texas, Georgia, as well as Illinois and California. You know how it is; you walk in and it feels “icky”. I don’t have a better explanation. Some may brush it off as stale air or un-clean. But you and I know it’s more than that.
When buyers shop for their home of their dreams, the first thing they feel is the energy inside the property. They walk in and it “feels good”. You KNOW what I’m talking about here. A buyer will not buy a home that doesn’t “feel good” when they step in. Sure the guru’s talk about kitchens and bathrooms, but if the atmosphere of the property isn’t positive, nobody will buy the house to live in it.
After 6 years of investing in real estate to rehab and resell, I finally hired an energy clearer to help dispel the bad energy in the properties I owned. Was it a success? I’m not sure, but she could tell me some things about the history, who my target buyer was and what I needed to do to attract that target buyer.
Did it work? I’ll never really know. However I went from NONE of my rehabs selling to 3 currently under contract. Coincidence? Maybe. Who knows? I do know that it’s not a magic answer. If you’re trying to sell a house that’s overpriced, or if your agent isn’t really positive about the potential sale, or some other hard concern, then all the energy clearing in the world won’t help sell the house. But if it’s priced right, looks good from the street and inside, and it’s still not selling? It’s time to think outside of the box.
OK, so am I crazy or what?