To Sell A House In California, It Might Need Good Feng Shui

hide captionAbout 40 miles east of Los Angeles, houses in the new College Park subdivision are designed to have good feng shui.

About 40 miles east of Los Angeles, houses in the new College Park subdivision are designed to have good feng shui.

If you leave Los Angeles, Calif., on Interstate 10 and head east for about 40 miles, you'll run into a quintessentially suburban phenomenon: the opening of a subdivision.

hide captionIn a house with good feng shui, the staircase leads away from the front door so the energy doesn't rush out before it can do good for the house.

At one such development called College Park in Chino, Calif., the lawns are bright green, the D.J. is spinning classic rock and a lot of the conversations are in Mandarin. Among those looking for a house is Eddie Yung. He lives in China now, but he's moving to California.

The number of Chinese buying homes in the U.S. has more than doubled since 2007, with most of those sales in Southern California. Some are buying for investment purposes prices are positively cheap compared to the market in Beijing or Shanghai and others are planning to start a life in the states.

Marketing to those Chinese buyers has meant learning about what customers want in a house's design, says Mark Torres, a division president for Lennar Homes, the company that's building the subdivision.

"We consider feng shui elements in all our designs," Torres says. "Everything from the water-fire elements and making sure that we don't have those types of conflicts [and] designing the entry of the homes to keep all that positive energy in the home."

Just a few miles from College Park is the town of Chino Hills, which Lisa Dutton calls home. But her house has feng shui problems. It's had issues since she bought it from a Chinese seller 15 years ago.

"As he was moving out, he told us the reason he was moving was the house didn't have good chi," Dutton says. "We had no idea what chi was! Had no idea whatsoever. So, we bought the house."

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To Sell A House In California, It Might Need Good Feng Shui