Home sellers look for divine help

After three real-estate agents, two price reductions and nearly a year on the market left them with no offers on their town house in Las Vegas, George and Katherine Grodin turned to a higher power for help.

They bought a 4-inch plastic figurine of St. Joseph -- believed by some to be the patron saint of home and employment -- and placed it upside down in their patio with hopes of breaking their home-selling slump.

"I just felt so helpless," said Katherine Grodin, 47. "I needed to do something."

The trick hasn't worked yet for the Grodins, but as the real-estate market has continued to flag, a number of the faithful -- and the desperate -- have embraced the odd ritual of burying St. Joseph.

Amazon sells St. Joseph figurines. So do some True Value and Ace hardware stores. At the four Elliott's Ace Hardware stores in the Milwaukee area, customers have bought more than 182 in the past 12 months, said Scot Stark, the manager of the Elm Grove branch there.

Robert DiCocco, the manager of the DiCocco Family St. Jude Shop in Havertown, Pa., said that not a day goes by without someone coming into the store for a statue to help speed up a house sale.

"They're a little sheepish when they ask, ‘What saint do I bury?'" said DiCocco, whose family business is one of the largest religious-goods stores on the East Coast.

Real-estate agents are snapping up "St. Joseph Home Selling Kits" for would-be clients -- in both English- and Spanish-language editions. Ronnie Wilson, an agent in Carlsbad, Calif., includes the figurine in her regular marketing kit, along with "For Sale" signs and online advertisements.

Wilson started suggesting that home sellers bury the icons in their front lawns three years ago after hearing about the practice from other real-estate agents.

"I do carry a hoe around in my car, in case they want me to do it for them," Wilson said. "Every little bit helps."

The interest in St. Joseph, the husband of Mary, the mother of Jesus, has a history in the real-estate world.

During the busts of the 1980s and 1990s, agents and homeowners revived the tradition, which might date to medieval Europe. As the story goes, a group of nuns received a needed parcel of land for their convent after burying their St. Joseph medallions and praying to the saint for aid.

These days, most people choose a kit such as the ones sold by Philip Cates, a mortgage banker in Modesto, Calif., and the owner of StJosephStatue.com. He sells an 8-inch model for $13.95.

Typically, the kits include a 3- to 8-inch figurine, a bag to bury it in, instructions and sample prayers. Sellers are advised to bury the figurine beneath a "For Sale" sign or near the entrance of a house.

Once the property sells, tradition calls for the seller to dig up the statue, dust it off and keep it in a place of honor.

And if no one makes an offer?

"Perhaps it's not time to sell," said Cates, who has sold more than 250,000 do-it-yourself kits since he started his mail-order company in 1990.

For some homeowners, the statues stay only as long as it takes for escrow to close. Debra Schneider was having trouble selling her custom-built house three years ago in Columbia County, N.Y., when a neighbor's relative suggested that she bury a statue.

"I thought she was kidding me. I told her, ‘I'm a Jewish yogi. I don't believe in that,'" said Schneider, 55.

The next day, though, she went and bought a statue, figuring that she had little to lose. The house sold.

"Of course, I had lowered the price, which might have helped, too," Schneider said.

When Schneider decided to pull up stakes again this fall, after her daughter was accepted into an academic program in Chicago, one of the first things she did was bury another St. Joseph statue.

"There's something ritualistic about it that people can connect with," she said. "It's taking a moment to connect with something bigger than ourselves, at a time when most of us feel totally out of control."

Some religious leaders, however, are less than enthusiastic.

The Rev. Pat Lee of St. Joseph Catholic Church in Chicago regularly pleads with anxious parishioners to pray for divine aid -- not to bury their church's namesake in the dirt. When a nearby religious-goods store started carrying the St. Joseph kits, he chastised the staff for encouraging "a ridiculous superstition."

"You are burying a saint and holding him hostage in the ground until you get what you want," Lee said. "This is not magic. This is ridiculous."