A housing slump fit for St. Joe
Local homeowners desperate to sell a house amid the worst residential real estate market in a decade increasingly are seeking divine intervention in the form of a 4-inch-tall plastic figurine of St. Joseph, according to area religious gift shops.
``The statues have been selling really well," said Joe Scarlata , manager of St. Anthony's Book & Gift Shop in Framingham. ``We sell about 5,000 a year."
Lately, around 20 people a week have been coming into the store looking for a supernatural edge to help sell their home, and the store receives online orders from all over the country, he said.
Some Catholics have long believed that burying a likeness of St. Joseph, the husband of Mary, upside down in a corner of the yard will help sell a house. Scarlata says customers tell him it works.
``People tell me, `I picked it up, and I got home after not having a bid for months and all of the sudden I had a bid that day and it sold the next day,' " Scarlata said. ``I hear that all the time."
The shop packages the statu es with a St. Joseph medal, a prayer card, and an explanation of the legend that credits St. Joseph with helping sell property.
Roman Inc., an Illinois-based company that makes the statues, recently reported sales as being up 25 percent this year, while online sales have doubled over last year at stjosephstatue.com.
Legend holds that the practice began in Europe 500 years ago when an order of nuns desperate for land to build a convent buried St. Joseph medals and eventually were rewarded with the property they sought. Scarlata thinks the tradition caught on in the United States during the 1800s, after a Montreal monk, according to lore, was given a tract of land to expand his parish after burying St. Joseph statues.
Bible Books & Things in Milford, which doesn't sell the plastic figurines, sends a constant stream of would-be homesellers to the Fatima Shrine's gift shop in neighboring Holliston.
``We do get a lot of people coming in asking for them. We always have in the spring and summer, when homes are usually for sale," said Bible Books & Things employee Jean DiVincentis , who said she has noticed a slight increase in requests lately. ``We were just joking that we could make a lot of money if we start selling them."
A Fatima Shrine staff member who declined to give her name said her shop had seen a surge of sales this summer.
The apparent sales boom for the statues may be continuing, with the Waltham-based Massachusetts Association of Realtors reporting this month that sales of single-family homes and condominiums statewide fell for a fourth consecutive month in July, compared with the same period last year, and selling prices sagged as well. The number of homes sold statewide last month was the lowest for a July in over a decade, the association reported.
St. Anthony's Scarlata emphasizes that he's not selling a Catholic version of a rabbit's foot. He doesn't believe in lucky charms.
``It's the prayers. That's the major thing," he said. ``Burying the statue in the yard on its head, that's a superstition. I tell people, `How would you like to be buried on your head?' It's really secondary if it's even buried."
Even so, Scarlata said the statues were among his worst-selling items until he began packaging them as a ``St. Joseph Home Sale Prayer Kit" for $9.95.
``In our little kit, we suggest when they bury the statue they leave it there for the benefit of the people that come afterward ," he said.
Scarlata said St. Joseph's potential influence isn't limited to unloading a house in a lousy market.
``He's always good for men to find wives and women to find husbands, and for people to find jobs," he said.
Globe staff writer Douglas Belkin contributed to this report. 
