When Celia Dumas put her house on the market in September 2023, she expected an influx of interest.
After all, the 17th-century five-bedroom coach house in an idyllic Hampshire village ticked every box as the perfect countryside family pad, with a competitive price tag of £950,000 to match.
Fourteen months and countless viewings later, however, she was still without a buyer.
‘One prospective buyer viewed my house five times only to say they couldn’t find the money to make an offer,’ says Celia, 56, an art and antiques dealer.
‘My estate agent had blamed everything from the general election and budgets to school summer holidays and Christmas for the fact that I couldn’t get a buyer.
‘In the meantime, I’d lost out on my dream Victorian home in the centre of Winchester when the vendor accepted an offer from someone else who’d already sold their property. I was heartbroken.’
Desperate, and hoping for a miracle, in November 2024 Celia turned to local businesswoman Donna Laine for help.
Within two months, she had an offer on her house without even needing to lower the asking price. Her joy was tempered only by the fact that she’d lost out on the Victorian terrace she’d fallen in love with.
Or so she thought.
Art and antiques dealer Celia Dumas could not sell her house for months, meaning she nearly lost out on her dream home
Celia’s old property – a five-bedroom coach house in an idyllic Hampshire village – had a competitive price tag of £950,000, but she initially struggled to find a buyer
Two weeks later, she got a call; the property had come back on the market after the chain had broken.
Celia credits Donna entirely with her good fortune. And you can’t blame her, given the dismal state of the property market for sellers.
In 2025, it took an average of 200 days – seven months – to sell a house, the longest time in nine years.
You may be assuming that Donna is some hotshot property agent. But the truth is rather more unexpected – not to mention unusual.
Because Donna, 62, believes that people can create the future they desire – be it regarding their love life or their career – by ‘remembering’ it as if it had already happened.
While many may dismiss this as woo-woo nonsense, one of the areas where she says she’s had most success with this technique of making ‘imagined memories’ of the future, which she calls The Remembering Technique (RT), is property.
‘It’s particularly effective with selling and buying houses, because it’s easy to create a memory of living in a new house before it’s happened,’ says Donna, who lives in a renovated cottage in Winchester.
‘We can visualise a lovely family moving into our own home and looking after it, and at the same time create a memory of making a coffee in the kitchen of our new home, putting fresh towels in the bathroom, enjoying the garden.’
In short, it’s similar to the practice of manifesting. But can the creation of a memory you want to happen really impact the famously turbulent property market?
Celia certainly believes so.
Donna Laine, who helped Celia, is not a hotshot estate agent, but developed The Remembering Technique (RT) – creating the future one desires by ‘remembering’ it as if it’s already happened
Donna used RT to create memories sitting in the kitchen of her dream home, lighting fires and buying tiles for the bathroom, until the agent finally called to say it was hers
During three sessions with Donna, Celia created a ‘memory’ that her home had been sold, imagining the process going smoothly, packing up her belongings and handing over the keys to the new owners.
‘I repeated these mantras every day and wrote down all the things I “remembered” happening in the next six months, including moving to Winchester and even throwing a housewarming party,’ Celia explains.
Viewings had dried up before they worked together, but after her first session on a Tuesday, viewings then came in for that Saturday – with more to follow. Within six weeks, Celia had accepted an offer.
The house was sold early last year at the full asking price.
Donna developed The Remembering Technique – and has subsequently written a best-selling book of the same name – after hitting rock bottom when her marriage ended in 2016.
Top of the list was leaving the property she’d rented while her divorce was sorted, and buying the perfect new home for herself and her then six-year-old daughter Willow.
‘I secured a mortgage in principle then did a mind map of my dream house,’ says Donna. ‘It was old, beautifully designed, and close to Willow’s school, with an Aga in the kitchen, open fires, a closed garden and a potting shed.
‘I found the perfect house but it was under offer to another buyer. I said to the agent: “If the sale falls through, I’m ready to go, I’ll buy it.”
‘I then started using my Remembering Technique to make it a reality, creating a memory of lighting the fires in that very house, sitting in the kitchen, buying tiles for the bathroom and plants for the garden. I did this consistently every day and just a week later the agent called to say the sale had fallen through.
‘Shortly after the financial markets crashed, leading the lender to pull my mortgage. But even then, I still kept remembering that the house was ours and that I managed to secure another mortgage against the odds. Willow and I moved into the house in January 2023.’
While you may dismiss these success stories as coincidence, Donna claims there is some science to back it up.
Donna has spent years devouring studies into quantum physics – the principles of which suggest that our thoughts can influence our reality by altering the energy we put out.
‘You attract more of what you think and believe, good and bad,’ says Donna, who charges £200 for an online course or £275 for an in-person hour-long session.
‘With house selling and buying in particular, RT takes you out of your comfort zone of trying to control every detail with estate agents and potential buyers, instead remembering the memory that you want to happen, then trusting that the universe will deliver it, which allows your future memory to work for you.’
Whether you believe it or not, Donna claims her success rate is 100 per cent, because her clients are open minded and committed to the process.
Mother-of-two Natalie Freeman, 56, also sold her property after enlisting Donna’s help.
A married trauma counsellor from Bristol, she was tearing her hair out trying to sell the five-bedroom property in the city, which she inherited from her father.
‘I put it on the market for £400,000 in April 2022 and had six viewings and two offers, which both fell through,’ says Natalie. ‘The second one was from a family who offered £380,000 but then couldn’t get a mortgage.’
Eight months after putting the house on the market, Natalie turned to Donna for weekly sessions. ‘Every day I’d repeat these affirmations and visualise the sale going through smoothly and a new family living in the house.
‘Within a month of starting the technique I suddenly had a flurry of viewings.’
She accepted an offer at the full asking price at the end of January 2023, with the sale completed two months later.
Total coincidence? Perhaps. But if you’re currently stuck in an ‘unsellable’ property and don’t know where else to turn, it might not hurt to give it a try…
