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I was stuck in an unsellable house. After 14 months with no offers I was at my wit’s end. Then I tried this one thing that your estate agent will never suggest – and sold it at full asking price in just weeks.
When Celia Dumas put her house on the market for £950,000 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 ideal countryside family pad with a competitive price tag 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 who is divorced with two daughters aged 23 and 20.
‘In the meantime, I’d lost out on the perfect Victorian home I’d found in the centre of Winchester when the vendor accepted an offer from someone else who’d sold their property. I was heartbroken.
‘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.’
Hoping for a miracle, in November 2024 she turned to local businesswoman Donna Laine for help.
Within two months, she had an offer on her house. Her joy was tempered only by the fact that she’d lost out on her dream Victorian terrace.
Or so she thought.
Two weeks later, she got the call she’d been remembering: 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, currently.
In 2025, it took an average of 200 days – seven months – to sell a house, the longest time in nine years.
She didn’t lower the price or alter anything else about her approach. Because Donna, 62, believes that people can create the future they desire by remembering it as if it had already happened.
From your love life to your career, and everything in between, by creating imagined memories, the jeweller from Winchester believes people can create the future they desire.
While many may dismiss it as woo-woo nonsense, one of the areas where she’s had most success is in selling and buying properties.
‘It’s particularly effective with selling and buying houses, because it’s easier to create a memory of living in a new house before it’s happened based on the feeling we had when we viewed it,’ says Donna. ‘We can visualise a lovely family moving into our own home and looking after it, at the same time as we can create a memory of making a coffee in the kitchen of our new dream home, putting fresh towels in the bathroom, and we know how that makes us feel.’
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.’
Donna developed The Remembering Technique (RT) - 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 getting the perfect new home for herself and her then six-year-old daughter Willow.
‘I secured a mortgage then did a mind map of my dream house,’ says Donna, 62, who is ranked in the top 100 small business entrepreneurs in the UK. ‘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 try and 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 and would I like it.
‘Willow and I moved into the house in January 2023.’
While you may dismiss these success stories as coincidence, 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 at a fundamental level by altering the energy we put out to the universe.
‘You attract more of what you think and believe, good and bad. With RT, you change your life with your own memories.
‘The more you do it, the more effective it is. It can be as simple as remembering that tomorrow you had a brilliant day, a work meeting went to plan, you got a parking space right outside your door, or your children were happy.
‘I practiced by remembering one day at a time. Then a week. It’s reverse engineering, with a difference. You raise your vibration and commit to your memory and then the mind will bring it together.
‘I studied successful people and discovered that many have the ability to remember that they did certain things, for example composers such as Mozart, Elgin and Chris Martin remember their music.’
Donna admits feeling ‘daft’ as she began writing notes to see if she could remember the following day, a journey she was due to make later in the week, and a holiday she wanted to take.
‘The more I did it, writing down memories of what happened and what I achieved during each day or week, the more success I got. My jewellery shop was busier, my daughter was more settled.
‘With house selling and buying in particular, RT takes you out of your comfort zone of trying to control every detail, which allows your future memory to work for you.
‘It’s all linked to science and when we get the neurons in our brains to fire differently, the technique can be used in any area of your life to get what you want.
‘My success rate is 100 per cent, because my clients have understood the importance of letting go of old ways of doing things, being open minded to a new way and committing to the process to allow it to happen.
‘When we try to control something too much, we limit the possibilities.
‘You just have to start remembering and creating a new feeling in that memory, and the outcome you desire is yours. Sometimes the results don’t happen the way you think that they will, but you will still achieve what it is that you want.’
Natalie Freeman, 56, also sold her property after enlisting Donna’s help.
A trauma counsellor from Bristol, she’s married with two kids aged 23 and 21, and was tearing her hair out trying to sell the five bedroom property in the city that she inherited from her father.
‘I put it on the market 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 £380,00 but then couldn’t get a mortgage.’
Natalie had weekly sessions with Donna during which she’d remember that the house had been sold, and that the proceeds were the ‘happy money’ that her father wanted her and her brother to enjoy.
‘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, which put me in a different zone mentally.’
She accepted an offer at the end of January 2023 and completed the sale two months later.
‘Before working with Donna, I’d been stuck in a cycle of thinking the house would never sell, because even when you accept an offer so much can go wrong.’
Donna adds: ‘You have to be consistent with RT and you have to believe in it. The more you practice it, the more effective it is.’