Do Houses Hold Energy

I'll admit it upfront: I'm a person who believes in energy. The nickname Spooky has followed me around for many years. Darn right I love rocks and crystals and all things mystical and I am a firm believer in the need for an occasional fire ceremony.

If you want to talk about the vibe a house or a room gives off, I am fully and unapologetically in.

I say this as someone who also spends her professional life looking at bones, layouts, mechanicals, updates, and finishes — the parts of a house you can put on an inspection report. Both things can be true at once, and years of walking through homes has taught me that I’m not the only one who thinks homes hold energy – not by a long shot.

Can't Shake This Feeling

Every so often at a showing, it happens. A client stands in the middle of a room, goes quiet for a minute, and then says some version of the same thing: "I don't know. It just feels... off." They can't point to what's wrong. The layout works. The price is fair. The light is good. But something in them has started to rule the house out as an option, and it happened before their conscious mind caught up.

Sometimes, they're a little sheepish about it, perhaps bracing for me to challenge them or question the rationale of it. But I never do — because I believe them, and because I've had enough of my own occasions to know better. More than once, I've had that same feeling, done some digging, and found a troubling history to the house that never made it into the disclosure. Whether it should have been disclosed is a separate conversation. The point is this: the house told on itself before anyone else did.

It Goes Both Ways

This works the opposite way too, and there is nothing better than walking someone through a home that feels like it was genuinely loved. Sometimes, you can just sense the happy memories sitting in the walls. Everyone wants to buy that house and you don't have to point it out, because people feel it the moment they walk in – just as they feel the other thing.

We could explain a lot of this away. Some of what people are sensing really is just data arriving faster than words — the way light lands in a room at that hour, how sound behaves in a hallway, some faint, unnamed cue about how a space was cared for. That's real, and it's part of it. But it isn't all of it, and most people who've spent enough time walking through other people's houses know that.

Not everyone has the sense. Some clients read a house the way they'd read a spreadsheet — square footage, layout, condition, done. There’s nothing wrong with that; it's a perfectly good way to buy a house. But others walk in and something else happens. They go quiet. They touch a doorframe for no reason. They know, in a way that has nothing to do with the listing sheet, before they've seen the second floor. I've learned to take that seriously. 

I don't know exactly what that something is and I'm not going to pretend I do. If you're someone who gets a genuine feeling from a home, trust your instincts. And if you believe houses hold energy — I agree with you and plenty of others do, too.