The Importance of Feng Shui & Selling Your Home (Featuring L.A. & Phoenix Realtor Chris Gray)
Chris Gray is a top producing agent in the higher end markets of Los Angeles. In this episode, how his knowledge of Chinese buyers and the Chinese market can help you sell your home. Plus, we also discuss the role the ancient art of Feng Shui can have in the process.
Here’s a transcript of our conversation:
Chris Gray: Yeah. I grew up in Westwood. And then, after the third grade, then, my mother decided to move us to Phoenix where her family was. And so from there, then, I grew up there and went to high school and Arizona State University there. I always had an interest in languages. I pick it up really fast. Originally, I wanted to do German. And then, I studied German and did all that. But most Germans, they speak English. And so it’s not that big of a, I guess, a pro for you to speak German. From there, then, I transitioned to Chinese, because I heard it was going to be a big business language in the future. Thought I’d try my hand in it. I just found a Chinese school in Phoenix. Went there. It was more like dabbling versus really, really serious at the time. But I liked it. Then, my-
Kirk Hawkins: So it was very strategic by picking Chinese.
Chris Gray: Yeah. It was like, okay, I could see a future in this. And especially after I went to Taiwan for a summer. Because my Chinese teacher, at the time, she had her brother who’d lived in Taipei. And so that was me really diving in a little bit or sticking my feet in the water. And I decided that I liked it. So I came back. And then, at ASU, in college, that’s when I did it every single day, and really intense curriculum, and taking classes all in Chinese, sort of. And then, they sent me to China a couple times. I lived there for, I mean altogether, about two years.
Chris Gray: And then, moved back to Phoenix. When I came back to Phoenix, that’s when I got my real estate license and decided, well, I should use my language ability in some way. Because I’ve spent countless hours, money, time, energy learning the language. I might as well use it somehow. So I decided, okay, well, Phoenix, yeah it’s not LA. It’s not New York. But let me see if the ASU Chinese students if I can sell them homes. And so I did. And I mean it was $200,000, $300,000 homes.
Kirk Hawkins: Which is standard for that part of Arizona.
Chris Gray: Yeah, exactly. Standard for Phoenix.
Kirk Hawkins: Which is amazing for us. We’re like, where is this place?
Chris Gray: I know. Right? You can’t find that here. But yeah, so I did that in Phoenix. Not only the Chinese market but, obviously, I had other buyers and sellers who weren’t Chinese. But I just didn’t feel that I was getting the really getting the career that I wanted to in Phoenix. Especially with my big language ability. So I decided to get my real estate license in California. And then, moved here. It’s definitely been really great getting buyers and sellers. And now, the market’s kind of transitioning to where the Chinese buyers, since they can’t get their money out of China, are transitioning to sellers or selling and then buying something else.
Kirk Hawkins: Going back to the beginning of the Chris Gray story, did you start out, it sounds like, learning Chinese? And isn’t it specifically Mandarin-
Chris Gray: Yeah, Mandarin.
Kirk Hawkins: That you… And learning Mandarin was the first step. And then, the second step was real estate. Was it more like I definitely want to know this, because I’m going to be in business? What was the thought process of getting into real estate? Were you like, I love real estate? I love homes.
Chris Gray: Ever since I was five years old, I wanted to be a real estate agent. No.
Kirk Hawkins: Like every weekend, you were going to open houses or like how did that all come together?
Chris Gray: No. Really it was like I learn… And that’s what they tell you in the program, too, which is the flagship program at ASU. And it’s this fantastic program set up by the US State Department. Basically, it gets your Chinese to a professional level. What you choose to do with it after you graduate is up to you. And that’s where your real training starts. Because you’re not just answering questions in a classroom. But you’re dealing with people, like Chinese individuals, and their problems, and questions, etc, etc. Which is definitely way different than a structured classroom environment. And through that program, I decided, okay, I want to partner my Chinese ability, which is at a high level, with some sort of business aspect. Whether that’s finance. Whether that’s real estate. Whether that’s retail or something else. What am I gravitated towards?
Chris Gray: Before I left Shanghai, I was in the EB-5 industry. That’s basically in immigration investment where a foreign individual will invest $500,000 into a project here in the US, whether it be a medical facility or a hotel. And that $500,000 has to create 10 jobs within the project. And then, they get their US green card. So that’s what I was doing before in China as the number one participant in the program. But coming back from Shanghai, I knew that that was kind of coming to a close. So I said to myself, well, what can I still do with using my Chinese ability? And I saw that a lot of Chinese were buying up real estate in the US. And I said, well, what if I just become a real estate agent? That was the whole thought process behind it.
Kirk Hawkins: That’s really smart. And I didn’t ask you this. But learning Mandarin, was it difficult? What was the process of all of that, too?
Chris Gray: Oh, it’s just a lot. It’s like a full-time language. People that know like French, German, Spanish, etc, etc, it’s like they have a commonality. A Latin based language. It’s a lot easier to put those together. Whereas Chinese is just totally different. And you have to learn all the symbols, and characters, and the different dialects, and the accents. And not only just that but then dealing with the culture. How the northerners are different from the southerners. From the Taiwanese to the people from Hong Kong. It’s a lot. It’s a long term process. Basically, you learn the language. And then, after you graduate, then you learn. And you learn the culture, too. But then, after you graduate, and you start to deal with Chinese individuals, then you really get to know how they are in business.
Kirk Hawkins: Right. Right. Then, we fast forward back. You’re back here in Los Angeles. You’re kind of pounding the pavement, getting your business going. And you’re working with everyone. But you also have this niche with buyers from China. Buyers and sellers from China. What have you learned through those experiences? What have you learned about working with them, about yourself, and about the whole process?
Chris Gray: Well, you just have to realize that they’re not… And some of them have been here for a long time, but most of them, most of my clients haven’t, so they don’t know how things are done here. Or they’ve already had bad experiences with buying a house and they got ripped off, they feel. So they’re a little bit even more cautious. You just have to feel out the person to see exactly what their experiences are. But basically, across the board, you’re going to put in more work than you otherwise would just with explaining to them the process, how things work, how to do this, and really helping them with tons of things. Even non-real estate related. Because in the Chinese culture, you become friends first before you do business. Whereas in the American culture, it’s the exact opposite. Where you do business. If it goes well, maybe we’ll be friends. Chinese, it’s different. They want to go out. They want to wine and dine. They want to get to know you, chat, have some red wine, Chinese food or steaks, or whatever. And then, they feel comfortable. And they feel like they can trust you.
Kirk Hawkins: You get invited to a lot of family events, it seems like, too.
Chris Gray: Well, definitely things to their house. Or they’ll be like, oh, well, we’re going to meet on ocean at Santa Monica. Come, this time. Then, they’ll pay the bill or whatever. You pay the bill if you treat. It’s just this whole kind of… Which is nice, because a lot of my American clients I really don’t become friends with them. But the Chinese ones I do. It’s definitely been interesting.
Kirk Hawkins: Yeah. Yeah. When you’re living in China and Taiwan, are there things about the culture that you’ve learned? I mean, obviously, learning about the culture informs your business. But are there things about the culture, knowing all of that, how it impacts how you do business here, too? Because beyond, for example, beyond just becoming friends and then clients, and friends first, clients later, are there different nuances that you have to keep in mind when you’re looking at properties or putting their property on the market to keep in mind as well?
Chris Gray: Yeah. From a price perspective, it’s kind of, individually, it just depends. Some of them want as much as they are unrealistic and want way more than you think. Whereas others will really listen to you. And you go, okay, that makes sense. Let’s do it. Everybody has their bottom line or they put their foot in the sand somewhere. That’s from a sellers perspective. Buyer perspective, that’s interesting, too, because everybody talks about feng shui. Right? Just structurally, the house, some people want it to be feng shui. But-
Kirk Hawkins: So is that still a thing?
Chris Gray: It’s still a thing. But mostly the people from China who really prescribe to it are the ones from southern China or Hong Kong. They’re the ones who really are fervent about it. Whereas the ones from the north are like, oh yeah, that has a four in the address. They’ll be like, oh, I don’t really care about that. Or, “oh, the stairs are leading right out the front door and thus the chi, the money, is leaving the house.” Some people would be like, no way, can’t do that. We got to go to a different house. Whereas others are like, eh, whatever. Like superstitious.
Kirk Hawkins: Well, the thing with the stairs. The idea is that money is flowing outside? Or is that what that means?
Chris Gray: Basically. Yeah. Or if, for example, the front door, you can see straight from the front door to the back door outside of the house, so basically the chi doesn’t stay in the house. It’s not in the house. It just literally just flows straight through the house. And you’re not getting any of it. But there are ways to combat it. For example, if you plant a large tree in front of your house in front of the door, you can combat that. Or even you can do that, too, if it’s perpendicular. And a street is hitting the house at a 90 degree angle, which is not good, too, but you can combat it that way. Or if it’s a big entry way, you can put flowers or a round table from between the front door and the staircase, which keeps the chi in the house. Or put a wall up there or something like that to keep it there. So you can do things to circumvent it.
Kirk Hawkins: Aren’t there other things about feng shui when it comes to the layout of the room and where you put specific pieces of furniture, too? Like there can’t be… A bed can’t overlap with a doorway?
Chris Gray: Well, in the bedroom, they always say that you can’t have a mirror facing the bed. That’s really, really bad. Or a mirror facing the front door from the inside. That’s terrible. Those are easy fixes, though, because you just remove the mirror. As far as when you get really intricate where for furniture is put in the house, I don’t really deal with that part. Since I’m not an interior decorator. I just sell them the house. And then, however they want to arrange their furniture is up to them. I guess like at that point.
Kirk Hawkins: Yeah. As long as the other things work-
Chris Gray: Not going to get my PhD in feng shui just yet.
Kirk Hawkins: Right. Right. No, totally. But the other thing that you mentioned, too, is really interesting. They saw four either in the address or the price. And that was enough for them to move onto another one.
Chris Gray: Well, I don’t know about the price, per se. I’ll go back to that. I know I sold a house on Spalding Drive in Beverly Hills, or a condo, and it was 415. And the seller, who also obviously bought the place, was Chinese and really cared. She said that the place was perfect feng shui. Well, I mean it had a four in the address. So obviously, it wasn’t perfect. But for her, that really didn’t matter. So it almost tells you it’s really so individualized as far as the exact tenets of feng shui that they actually prescribe to. She could just look at it from the fact that the layout of the condo and all of that. Whereas the four in the address really didn’t matter too much. But then, I sold another place in Beverly Hills where the price was $3,888,000. So you had that 888 in there. Which is eights are really, really good in Chinese numerology.
Chris Gray: Nice. So, I sold this house in Beverly Hills, and it was listed for 3,888,000 so you have the 888 right in there. And I thought that was an interesting price, because typically people do the 899, 895, but this was 888. To me, it’s neither here nor there, but the person who I was representing was from Shanghai, and I don’t know if that was the reason he was gravitated towards the house.
Chris Gray: He liked another house, but his wife liked that house. So he’s like, “Fine, whatever. This is our starter home in Beverly Hills. It doesn’t matter.” And originally he wanted to offer a lesser price, which I convinced him, well there’s multiple offers, we should just be serious and offer them full price, and great terms, and it happened. But he wanted to offer them 3.8 million, so $88,000 below, and try to negotiate.
Chris Gray: So you go, “Was he attracted to it because of the eights in the price? Or for other reasons?” I speculate that it’s other reasons, and the fact that he offered them full price was because I recommended it. So I don’t know. I don’t think it’s neither here nor there. I would have to ask him, and I don’t even think he really knows either. But you can get away with that, and see if it, I don’t know, the luck of fengshui, gets you to sell your house for more.
Kirk Hawkins: So basically, fengshui plays more of a role than the numbering might, potentially.
Chris Gray: Yeah, definitely. Because there are things about a house that you can’t change. You can’t take the house and move it to a different street, or make sure that it’s faced North, South versus East, West. Things like that, that you can’t change about the house.
Kirk Hawkins: Yeah. And it’s interesting in real estate, we come across so many unique circumstances. And there’s so many unique transactions, unique aspects of the transaction that you really never know what to expect. And so, it’s interesting to know your take on the numbers versus the fengshui, and the role that that could potentially play in a transaction.
Chris Gray: Yeah. Some people have said, “Well, it has to face South, and then backs up to North.” So that’s the ideal. Even better than the other way around, we’re just facing North and then it backs South. And some people say, “If it’s not North, South facing, don’t even bother showing it to a Chinese individual.”
Chris Gray: Whereas, I’ve seen others that, like the person in Beverly Hills, his is East, West. So, at the end of the day I say it really just depends on how much they prescribe to it. And you have to just take them out and show them places, and let them tell you, “Oh we don’t like this because of X, Y, Z.” Then you know from there. Which, I guess it’s just trial by error sometimes.
Kirk Hawkins: Yeah. So there’s nothing that a seller putting their home on the market could do to specifically try to appeal. It’s pretty much just, you have what you have, and the buyer is going to like it or dislike it.
Chris Gray: I mean, you can also argue that too. I mean you have those structural parts where you can’t. But then if you want to put a water feature to the right side of the front door to appeal to an Asian buyer, because that’s good luck and good fengshui, you can do that too.
Chris Gray: But it just depends on how much you want to appeal to them. And especially now, it’s interesting because they’re not buying as much as they used to. Now, that’s not to say that they’re not buying at all, but definitely with the Chinese government putting a real big halt on money leaving the country, it just makes it really hard to buy things cash. And they’re trying to do re-fi’s now things they bought, plus get loans, like all the rest of us.
Kirk Hawkins: Right.
Chris Gray: So it’s just interesting to see that they’re doing that now. And they’re just not buying like they used to.
Kirk Hawkins: So, in terms of the trends with the kind of market activity that’s happening with them, maybe, obviously, the political climate is having a huge impact.
Chris Gray: Political climate, and just thinking about it, they’re immigrants themselves. So they bought in the past, five, eight, 10 years, and they’re experiencing the U.S., and they bought to establish a house, have something that they own here, that they can go back to. From, after a few years of being here, they might say, well LA isn’t really the place for me.
Chris Gray: Or now my child is doing school in New York. So why do I need this place? Let me sell it. I’ll move to New York, or move to Seattle, or some other place. So, the home that they bought, they’re getting rid of, and up-sizing, downsizing, moving to another place. So I’m also seeing that too.
Kirk Hawkins: Interesting. And there’s limits on what they can take out of the country. And the limits, it sounds like, have been cut back too.
Chris Gray: Well, it’s $50,000 American dollars per person, per year. And they have all different ways of working around that, whether it’s getting all of their hundreds of employees to wire 50,000 out of China to here, or move it to Singapore. Hong Kong I heard is closed out since it’s part of China. [crosstalk 00:06:34].
Chris Gray: Yeah. So before, they would move it from the mainland to Hong Kong, and then move it to the U.S., whereas that is also out. So, I’ve heard they go to Australia, move the money to Australia, and then to the U.S. Or Canada to the U.S. Something like that. Or you can do the underground roots. I swear if you give China a problem, they will work around it. Find out some solution.
Chris Gray: So, there’s all these workarounds but, or people who, let’s say they have business, like a company in China, as well as the U.S., it’s easier to funnel money to the U.S. that way through their company. So, there’s all these work arounds, but for the normal person in China, it’s just getting so hard to get money out.
Kirk Hawkins: Oh, yeah, no. Very much so. One of the things that I was going to ask you, and what I like to always ask people as we’re talking, do you have a word of wisdom, or some sort of quote that you like, or some sort of what I like to call a motivation Monday that you’d want to impart on us?
Chris Gray: Motivation Monday. Oh, you should’ve had me prepare something.
Kirk Hawkins: Or is there a quote that you’ve always liked that you’ve lived your life by that-
Chris Gray: Well, I’ll tell her quote that my dad has uttered in my ear so many times. Basically, he says that, “He who hesitates loses.” I don’t know if he got that from somewhere, or if he had made that up himself. But he’s always told me that. And basically, it’s applicable to a lot of different things. You don’t want to sit on something too long. You want to move on it.
Chris Gray: And for me, I know I do that, too. Either once I say I’m going to do something, either I’m going to do it or I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to waiver. And especially, I guess, with putting your house on the market. You have to have a plan, and stick to it, and don’t hesitate. Just go ahead and do it.
Kirk Hawkins: It’s so interesting that that’s your quote, because my dad used to say the exact same thing, but he used to say, “He who hesitates is lost.” But he would always say it, like as a little kid, you’d go to the restaurant, and you’d have a hard time picking out what you were going to order, and that’s when he would always pull the trigger on that quote with me. But that’s so funny. But it’s true. You got to jump in sometimes head first. It sounds like that’s what you might’ve done with the move back here from Arizona, too.
Chris Gray: Yeah, no. I didn’t really know how it was going to work in LA. I know I have my dad here, and friends and family, but it’s not like I used my connections here to get leads. I really didn’t, I did grassroots marketing to get myself established here. So, it’s not like I have an in, in the community here. [crosstalk]
Kirk Hawkins: Yeah. So you’ve really had to build the business from the ground up.
Chris Gray: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Kirk Hawkins: As you’re also working the business in Arizona too, right?
Chris Gray: Yeah. So I have my mother for example, and people, anything that comes through in Phoenix or Scottsdale, Paradise Valley. They handle that for me there. But you know, LA is my area now. So it’s been an interesting ride. But my Chinese niche, although I can’t completely rely on it, it has definitely helped me a lot.
Kirk Hawkins: Yeah. Yeah. And what’s next? Where do you see the Greg Group going from here?
Chris Gray: You know, it’s really interesting, I just see it moving forward into the luxury market here, and helping Chinese, as well as non Chinese, help to sell their homes. Especially the homes that they bought in the past 10 years. And helping them re-buy for example, sell and then buy something else.
Chris Gray: And it’s interesting. Right the wrongs that they experienced when they moved here. which I like that. Like me, when I went to China. I got taken advantage of a few times, and it’s never good. Like you’re a foreigner, so it’s inevitably going to happen. But, you know, help them to do the right things this time around.
Kirk Hawkins: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chris Gray: Which is good. I hope that would happen to me.
Kirk Hawkins: Yeah, that’s a huge help and I think it would make a huge difference. Well, awesome. Chris Gray, thank you so much.
Chris Gray: Thanks so much for having me.
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