East meets Northwest (Florida)

“The very first house I feng shui’d sold within two weeks,” says Mary Anne Windes of Real Estate Professionals of Destin.

Windes, the 2009 president-elect of the Emerald Coast Association of Realtors told The Log that while feng shui — a 3,000-year old Chinese practice for channeling energy through a room or home — can’t move an overpriced home, the sale convinced her it’s more than superstition.

Based on the Taoist belief that land is filled with chi — energy — feng shui involves arranging your home to direct a positive flow of chi into your life, resulting in good fortune and health.

And home sales.

Windes said she came across a Web site, www.fengshui4re.com, that piqued her interest in the subject, partly because Suzee Miller, the feng shui consultant, was a real-estate broker.

“It’s an online-type course — she specializes in real-estate sales and doing feng shui for helping real estate,” Windes said.

Feng shui is a way “to get rid of all the negativity and anything stagnant in the property. It’s not superstition and it’s not magic, it’s commonsense things you might otherwise overlook. The goal is to let the property attract the buyer,” Windes said.

For example, fengshui4re.com recommends removing dead bushes and plants outside, and any dead flowers that have been left in the home, replacing them with “fresh, vibrant, live things of beauty — it’s common sense, but we don’t do that. And they really want the clutter gone — they say less is more,” Windes said.

The Web site says that ignoring clutter and debris is a mistake, because clearing away the clutter is a way to shift energy and “bring a property into balance.”

Miller’s tips on the site include a mix of feng shui energy theories and more mundane concerns: A home office in the bedroom is bad because it unbalances the chi flow, but it also makes it harder to detach from work and have an undisturbed rest.

Windes said until the first house sold, she’d been largely skeptical.

“I’m a big believer in God, if I was praying to God it was going to sell I might have believed more.” — but then the house not only sold in two weeks, it closed in one week with a cash sale. “Sometimes you’ve got to get God’s attention and say ‘I’m really trying here.’ ”

Windes said she hasn’t had as much success with the next two houses she’d feng shui’d, but “no amount of feng shui will overcome an overpriced house ... I’ve got sellers who are semi-motivated, but they’re not, in their words, going to ‘give it away.’ ”

Destin feng shui consultant James Allen of feng-shui-vibes.com said he advises clients “to make a gift of the house and package it like you were giving it to your best friend” even though you don’t yet know the person who will receive the gift.

For example, he said, a “somewhat desperate” woman from Atlanta once told him she hadn’t been able to sell her house after months on the market. Allen took a look at her home and made 53 specific recommendations, including painting the front porch and putting plants out there: “It was very unattractive ... it didn’t have any indication someone was living there.”

Three days later, he said, the woman called and told him that not only did his list require too much work, but added that “If I do all this stuff, I’ll want to stay in the house myself.” At which point, Allen said, the woman understood his point about making the house into a gift. She repainted her front porch and placed two plants on either side of the front door as feng shui “greeters.”

“She sold her home two weeks after I went there,” Allen said. “The kicker is, she sold it to a feng shui consultant.”