How can you improve your chances of a quick sale? It’s about shifting your home’s spiritual energy

After months of being at home, many are looking to move out and sell their homes, but it's not always easy. Christine Manby speaks to Ruthie Phillips, a feng shui practitioner helping cleanse bad energies and spirits and improving sale chances

(Illustration by Tom Ford)

How does the saying go? An Englishman’s home is his castle? Never has that felt truer than during lockdown. And, it seems, never have so many of us input the search term “house with an actual moat” into estate agents’ websites before. Or if not a moat, then at least a proper garden rather than a strip of paving slabs just big enough for the wheelie bin.

Within 24 hours of the government lifting restrictions on the property market back in May, Rightmove recorded more than 5 million visits and many of those were by people hoping to escape the city for the country, having spent lockdown in urban hell. That rush of interest in the country life was great news for people hoping to offload a small dark cottage with a view of open fields and a leaking septic tank but it was bad news for city dwellers hoping for a bucolic bargain.

In pre-Covid times, every Londoner living in a rabbit hutch could console themselves that when they retired, they’d be able to sell the flat and buy a small village outside the M25. Not anymore. House price growth in the country has been outstripping urban performance in a big way. And unless you’re renting, you’ve got to be able to convince someone that your hell hutch is their dream home before you can afford to escape the city anyway. Post-pandemic, it’s going to take more than an estate agent proficient with a fish-eye lens to shift your city pied-a-terre. Should you be turning to a more spiritual approach to selling your house?