Real-estate agent Michele Kolsky Assatly plants a St. Joseph statue for seller Fred Prins. (Christian Johnston)
Businessman Fred Prins had no problem selling his chic duplex penthouse to fabulously wealthy rapper Jay-Z back in 1999, when the real estate market was super hot.
But that was then, and this is now.
“The market has changed and things are a little different, and it’s a little harder to sell things as quickly as we like,” says Prins’ real estate agent, Michele Kolsky Assatly, who diplomatically plays down the desperation many homeowners like Prins feel while trying to sell their homes in the post-real-estate-bubble era.
Assatly has twice asked Prins to lower the asking price of his seven-figure, red-brick Colonial since it went on the market in the best section of Fort Lee, NJ, last April.
But desperate times call for desperate measures, so when the price drops failed to lure a buyer, the aggressive Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage agent called on a higher power: St. Joseph — better known as Joseph of Nazareth. He came in the form of a $10, 5-inch plastic action-figure-like statue “Made in China.” It’s now buried feet up, pointing toward heaven, 20 feet from Prins’ front door, as per the product’s directions, waiting for that one buyer to make an offer.
The origins of St. Joseph as a realty good-luck charm date back to the Middle Ages when some nuns, it is said, buried a St. Joseph medal in hope he would help them secure land for a convent. Today, if one believes, he’s more of a seller than a buyer.
Moreover, you don’t have to be Catholic to believe in the powers of St. Joseph, as evidenced by Assatly and Prins, both of whom are Jewish.
“I’m not the most spiritual guy in the world,” says Prins, who’s in the recycling business, “but if St. Joseph helps sell my house, it’ll be a compelling reason to convert,” he jokes.
While there’s no scientific data, the use of St. Joseph as an unofficial home-marketing tool is said to have begun in the US in the late 1970s. By the early 1990s, the phenomenon really exploded, with agents buying the statues in box lots, and the recent housing decline has once again made it a hot little item. It has been estimated that, over the years, hundreds of thousands of home sellers have used St. Joseph’s salesmanship to bring in a buyer.
“You have to wait until it’s hopeless, until the house has been on the market for a while,” says Assatly. “You can’t take advantage of St. Joseph.”
Is she a true believer?
Yes and no.
“It is,” she acknowledges, “a bit of witchy-poo. Some clients laugh at me when I suggest St. Joseph. But I say, ‘You guys know I’m going to try anything I can to sell your house, even a little witchy-poo, and the witchy-poo I’m going to use is St. Joseph.’ No one in all these years has ever said no.”
There’s no witchy-poo about it, asserts Lisa Maria Lahar, owner of International Boutique in Greenwich Village, who sells a $9.99 kit that contains a little plastic St. Joseph, a prayer and directions for the proper burial ceremony. She says that with the “dreadful” housing market, more and more “desperate” home sellers are buying the kits.
“There have been many success stories,” she claims. “Many people have come back to me and said, ‘Thank you.
I finally sold my house because of him.’ ”
Lahar gets her supply from one of the major national distributors, suburban Chicago company Roman Inc., which has been marketing the “St. Joseph Home Seller Kit” since 1996, according to director of product development gifts, Cynthia Miller.
“We now carry four versions, and increased our selection due to the increase in demand resulting from the depressed housing market,” says Miller, who boasts that some 4,000 retailers across the country buy the St. Joseph items.
Customer reviews on Amazon, meanwhile, resoundingly give it almost five stars.
Lahar’s home-seller customers for St. Joseph are “of all denominations,” she says, and include real-estate brokers who “buy in the dozens” and “get a break” on the price. One of her broker customers, Robert Agee, a Presbyterian who works with Carol Quatrone Realty in the Village, is planning to use St. Joseph ASAP to help sell a SoHo co-op. “It seems to work,” he says. “When people take the action [to buy the statue] there’s a shift from not selling to selling.”
However, some who have used St. Joseph to sell are embarrassed to talk about it, such as the fashion executive who asked to remain anonymous because she doesn’t want her friends to think she’s “parochial.” But taking the advice of her church-going mother in Queens, this year she planted St. Joseph in a flower pot on the front stoop of her Chelsea floor-through that had been sitting on the market “for some strange reason” for a couple of months. “A week later,” she boasts, still mystified, “I had a bidding war, and sold for cash.”