Buying a Home in Period 9

The most useful phone call I take is the one that begins, "We have found a flat, we are about to pay the token, can you look at it first." It is useful because of the timing. Almost everything in Feng Shui after you have moved in is a matter of working with what you have. Before you sign, you still have the one power the discipline can rarely give you later, which is the power to choose a different building.

This is why a pre-purchase audit is the best value in the whole practice. It is a small fee spent to inform the largest financial decision most families ever make. Here is roughly what I am looking at when I walk a property you are considering, now that we are in Period 9.

First, the land and the approach

Before any compass comes out, I read the form. This is the older half of Feng Shui, the study of the physical surroundings, and no chart can override it. I am looking at how the building sits, what faces the main door, and what the immediate environment does to the flow around it.

A few things give me pause quickly. A road driving straight at the front door. A sharp building edge pointing at it. The property sitting lower than a rushing road so that everything drains past it. A unit at the end of a long corridor that acts like a funnel. None of these are superstitions. They are observations about pressure, noise, sightlines and the felt experience of arriving home, which is what form school has always really been about.

Then, the facing and the period chart

Next comes the part that has actually changed with Period 9. Every building has a facing direction, and from that direction and its construction period I can draw its Flying Star chart and see how the stars land.

What I want to avoid are the genuinely awkward configurations. A chart where the wealth star and the health star are both trapped in the wrong places. A facing that, for this period, brings a difficult star to the very door you must use every day. Buildings completed or heavily renovated in Period 9 carry the current period's chart, which is a real consideration when comparing a brand new tower with an older resale flat, because they are literally reading from different maps.

I am not looking for a perfect building, because there is no such thing. I am looking for whether the difficult sectors fall on rooms you can afford to treat lightly, a store, a guest bath, a rarely used corner, or whether they land squarely on your bedroom and your kitchen, where they are much harder to live with.

The shape and the rooms

Then the ordinary architecture. The shape of the unit, because a floor plan with a large missing corner loses a whole sector of the chart and you cannot recommend a room that is not there. Where the main door sits. Where the master bedroom and the kitchen fall against the chart. Whether the good sectors coincide with the rooms you will actually spend your hours in, which is the quiet difference between a home that supports you and one you are forever compensating for.

Why before beats after

Everything on this list can be assessed from a floor plan, a location and a compass reading, often before you have paid anything you cannot recover. And almost none of it can be fixed cheaply afterwards. You cannot move a bedroom into a sector the builder did not put there. You cannot re-face a tower. What you can do, right now, is compare the two or three flats on your shortlist and let the reading break the tie the way the spreadsheet could not.

The couple who called me last month had narrowed it to two units in the same project, same price, same view. On paper they were identical. They were not identical at all. One placed their bedroom in a supportive sector and kept the awkward stars on the utility side. The other did the reverse. They took the first, and the audit cost them less than the token they were about to place on either.

Written from the practice. If you are weighing a property before you sign, you can begin a quiet conversation here.