With the housing market slowing to a demi-crawl, I’ve been getting inundated via email with various plots, plans and proposals to help people sell their homes.
Some of them are financial tools like point buydowns (mentioned in the August 27th entry) and owners carrying notes until the lending mess evens out.
The most emails we agents get these days have to do with someone offering to get our web site higher up in the search engines. These appear in our inbox every single day.
New magazines promising maximum exposure for our listings are commonplace, as well.
A sub-genre of real estate that has been popping up lately has been home staging companies. For a modest fee, an interior designer will come to the house and make suggestions on how to increase the appeal of your home with some simple techniques and, maybe, a throw pillow or two.
Other concepts are not so easily grasped.
About four or five times a year I get email offers to help my listings sell using the ancient oriental practice of feng shui. I have had it explained to me many times, and have even gone so far as to read books about it. But they’ll have to dumb it down a lot further for me to understand much more than the simple basics.
I can, for example, get my arms around the idea that the front door and the back door of a house shouldn’t be in a straight line, but when it gets any deeper than that, my eyes start glazing over and my mind starts wandering the way it has on both occasions when I tried to read James Joyce. Or watch John From Cincinnati.
The latest email I got was from an outfit selling statues of St. Joseph to aid people in selling their home. While feng shui has been around for 3,500 years, this practice is relatively new at just over 400 years.
The tradition of burying St. Joseph goes back to St. Theresa of Avila (1515-1582), who prayed to St. Joseph (Patron Saint of the family and of household needs) for more land to build a convent. She encouraged her Carmelite nuns to bury St. Joseph medals in the ground they wanted to own as a symbol of their devotion.
It’s caught on.
Today, people have upped the ante and now bury statues of St. Joseph instead of medals. (Some smart alecs say the reason he is depicted as bald in so many statues is that he's been buried upside-down too many times.)
Methods differ on exactly how and where to perform the burial. One camp insists that Joseph be buried in the front yard, upside-down, facing away from the house. Others maintain that he should be in the back yard, right side-up, facing the house. Some say once the house is sold, you have to dig him up and take him with you. Others say, no, you leave him in the ground at your old house and buy a new one.
Most agree that you need to say a prayer. And as long as you’re getting divine intervention, you may as well ask for full list price and that the buyers waive all inspections.
Does it work? Who knows? More than 2,000,000 St. Joseph statues are sold nationally each year, which ought to tell you something.
There are quite a few online vendors doing this, in fact. Among them are stjosephstatue.com, burystjosepth.com, stjosephhomesaleskit.com and ourfather.com. One of these sites even offers you options. You can get the Basic St. Joseph Home Sales Kit, the Deluxe St. Joseph Home Sales Kit or, if you’re in a really, really, really tough market, the Combo Kit featuring St. Joseph and St. Jude (Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes).
Some of them are financial tools like point buydowns (mentioned in the August 27th entry) and owners carrying notes until the lending mess evens out.
The most emails we agents get these days have to do with someone offering to get our web site higher up in the search engines. These appear in our inbox every single day.
New magazines promising maximum exposure for our listings are commonplace, as well.
A sub-genre of real estate that has been popping up lately has been home staging companies. For a modest fee, an interior designer will come to the house and make suggestions on how to increase the appeal of your home with some simple techniques and, maybe, a throw pillow or two.
Other concepts are not so easily grasped.
About four or five times a year I get email offers to help my listings sell using the ancient oriental practice of feng shui. I have had it explained to me many times, and have even gone so far as to read books about it. But they’ll have to dumb it down a lot further for me to understand much more than the simple basics.
I can, for example, get my arms around the idea that the front door and the back door of a house shouldn’t be in a straight line, but when it gets any deeper than that, my eyes start glazing over and my mind starts wandering the way it has on both occasions when I tried to read James Joyce. Or watch John From Cincinnati.
The latest email I got was from an outfit selling statues of St. Joseph to aid people in selling their home. While feng shui has been around for 3,500 years, this practice is relatively new at just over 400 years.
The tradition of burying St. Joseph goes back to St. Theresa of Avila (1515-1582), who prayed to St. Joseph (Patron Saint of the family and of household needs) for more land to build a convent. She encouraged her Carmelite nuns to bury St. Joseph medals in the ground they wanted to own as a symbol of their devotion.
It’s caught on.
Today, people have upped the ante and now bury statues of St. Joseph instead of medals. (Some smart alecs say the reason he is depicted as bald in so many statues is that he's been buried upside-down too many times.)Methods differ on exactly how and where to perform the burial. One camp insists that Joseph be buried in the front yard, upside-down, facing away from the house. Others maintain that he should be in the back yard, right side-up, facing the house. Some say once the house is sold, you have to dig him up and take him with you. Others say, no, you leave him in the ground at your old house and buy a new one.
Most agree that you need to say a prayer. And as long as you’re getting divine intervention, you may as well ask for full list price and that the buyers waive all inspections.
Does it work? Who knows? More than 2,000,000 St. Joseph statues are sold nationally each year, which ought to tell you something.
There are quite a few online vendors doing this, in fact. Among them are stjosephstatue.com, burystjosepth.com, stjosephhomesaleskit.com and ourfather.com. One of these sites even offers you options. You can get the Basic St. Joseph Home Sales Kit, the Deluxe St. Joseph Home Sales Kit or, if you’re in a really, really, really tough market, the Combo Kit featuring St. Joseph and St. Jude (Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes).
More boldly, yet another site charges you to have St. Joseph buried for you "virtually". No shipping, no actual statue, no real burial. Just faith, baby! And $4.95 US.
If anyone has heard of any other para-traditional methods of getting a home sold quicker, let me know via email or post it on this blog
I’m all ears.
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