A little divine intervention? It just might help a sale

What do you do when the housing market is slow and you absolutely must sell?

You pull out all the stops – and pray for the best.

Let’s focus on the pray part for a moment.

More than 15 years ago, when home prices plummeted along with the hopes of many would-be sellers, I wrote about an ex-Jesuit priest and his family who had bought a new home in another city. They cleaned, polished and painted but could not find a buyer for their old home. Carrying two mortgages at the same time began to take a heavy toll. To help speed the process of the home sale, they buried palm leaves in the four corners of the lot and said a few prayers.

The couple not only got a full-price offer, but they heard from other folks who had buried religious articles in their yards – statues, medals, holy cards – in the hope of divine intervention. Many claim they sold their home almost as soon as the garden spade was re-hung.

“The idea came from the agent who was helping us sell our place,” said Kevin King, the former priest who passed along the palm tip. “She was a member of our church and her mother had buried palm leaves in her yard. We thought, ‘What the heck?’ We had made an offer on a house we really wanted and we had to sell our place to get the house. I was certain a few prayers weren’t going to hurt.”

I thought about the Kings’ story recently because Palm Sunday is this weekend and palm leaves will soon be plentiful in Christian churches. But palms don’t seem to be the top choice when it comes to religious services to sell a home. Leading the league in divine intervention is the practice of burying a statue of St. Joseph in the yard.

A Modesto, Calif., couple has now sold more than 500,000 “St. Joseph: Underground Real Estate Agent” kits for $8, plus $1.95 for shipping and handling. When I contacted Karin Reenstierna and Phil Cates seven years ago, total sales amounted to about 6,000. You can get yours by calling 888-BURY-JOE or by going to www.stjosephstatue.com.

“You would think our market would really pick up when the market turns soft,” Cates said. “But sales have been consistent – fast and furious. Most of our sales come from the Internet and there are months when we send 4,000 kits out the door. If you buy the kit, we also offer to list your home for sale on our site for free.”

Reenstierna first used baby sitters to help place the small plastic statues and printed-out prayers into woven bags and manila shipping envelopes in her basement. The next phase included a part-time employee who made a few trips a week to the local post office. Now, product fulfillment is a big-time operation.

St. Joseph is the patron saint of the family and household. (If you are really desperate, St. Jude is the patron saint of impossible situations.)

“I’m not Catholic, so I was really new to all this,” Reenstierna said. “But I had a friend who years ago bought a statue of St. Joseph from a religious supply house and the salesperson said it was the very last one. ‘People,’ the salesperson said, ‘bury these in their yards and we can’t keep them in stock.’”

Shortly after my first conversation with Reenstierna, my mother-in-law called to interject that her mother once buried St. Anthony upside down in the mud so that he could “think about that new house” she wanted to buy in 1931. When everything worked out, she replaced the statue that had done the dirty work with a more expensive one from Italy and housed him in a beautiful garden grotto.

St. Anthony? Isn’t he called upon to help find lost possessions? (“Tony, Tony look around” … )

Perhaps my mother-in-law’s mother was simply confused. That’s because St. Anthony is the marriage saint in many areas of Latin America. On his feast day, June 13, women often buy a small statue of St. Anthony and bury it upside down for a week. If a woman finds a good husband, she turns the statue upright.

Come to think of it, maybe my mother-in-law’s mother knew precisely what she was doing in 1931.

Tom Kelly’s book “Cashing In on a Second Home in Mexico: How to Buy, Rent and Profit from Property South of the Border” was written with Mitch Creekmore, senior vice president of Houston-based Stewart International. The book is available in retail stores, on Amazon.com and on tomkelly.com