Saint Joe, Real Estate Magnate

My sister was trying to quickly sell her house. She placed a sign in the window and put the word on the street. After weeks of inquiring phone calls and a sorry set of guided tours, she began to think that she would not sell her home in time to cover the expenses associated with the purchase of her new home. She needed a miracle...

She had heard that if you buried a statue of Saint Joseph (the patron saint of children's analgesics) upside down in the back yard, his mystical powers would magically entice a potential buyer into seeking your home, leading to the eventual sale. So instead of listing on the internet or putting an ad in the local paper, she sought intercession of the biblical carpenter and proceeded to a local Christian icon dealer to purchase a statue of St. Joe. Within the hour it was entombed in dirt, upside down, where it began to wheel and deal in the ether, searching for a prospective buyer.

A day passed, two days passed. Two weeks later the phone rang and a motivated buyer was on the other end. A miracle! The upside-down tiki had sold the home!

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After hearing this story I attempted to inject the sorry tool of rational thought into the process. Of course, my family didn't appreciate that I was poo-poohing the clearly fruitful efforts of an inverted resin likeness of Jesus' old man.

I proposed a test, a scientific test. If the icon of St. Joseph is solely responsible for the divine sale of the home, we should be able to test this hypothesis scientifically by burying him in the yard of a home that is not for sale. External purchasing interest in the home would be a clear indication that the tiki alone is out peddling real estate. Heck, I'd sell my house if the price was right!

I went online and found a zillion websites selling kits with St. Joe to sell the home. Certainly nobody would be profiting off of this! I ended up buying it from this website . I happily buried the home-selling-mogul icon upside down in a hole behind my house. I went inside, cracked a beer and waited inside for the phone to start ringing. Days passed, months passed, and still, no interest in our home. Apparently I was the victim of a mystical real estate bubble.

The bottom line is, if you rely on your own hard work and careful planning, you will can effectively sell your home, car or even ice cubes to an Eskimo. It is fun to believe in icons and magic, but give yourself a little credit. My sister invested money, time and effort to market her home and with those efforts coincidence struck.

By the way, she never went back to exhume the statue, and it sits there to this day. I wonder if the new owner is getting phone calls everyday to sell his house. I'll guess not.