WITH loans hard to come by and buyers thin on the ground, some homeowners in the US are seeking divine help to sell their home.

They are turning to St Joseph, who, in addition to being the foster father of Jesus, is the patron saint of home sellers.

They bury a statue of St. Joseph in the garden of a property they want to sell, and then beseech him to intervene on their behalf to find a buyer.

"The trend has picked up in the last two years, when the market slowed down," said Dorie Glass, a real estate agent who recently sold a three-bedroom house in the plush Washington suburb of Bethesda for $US679,000 ($790,763), with a little help from St Joseph.

"Houses in neighbourhoods where you used to not even put up a 'for sale' sign before they were snapped up were sitting on the market for more than 30 days.

We don't force the idea on our clients but if a seller says something to me about St Joseph, I say, absolutely, go out, get one and bury it.

"What else can we do in this market?"

Falling sales

Market analysts predict that home sales will fall to less than six million this year compared with nearly 6.5 million in 2006.

House prices are also expected to slide by around 2 per cent by year's end from record-high levels last year.

Statues can be picked up at religious paraphernalia shops, such as the Catholic Information Centre in Washington, which sells around a dozen St. Josephs each week.

"Last year, we sold around 50, but in the past two months that's doubled," said Chris Derderian, the chief buyer at the shop.

Hope in slow market

Phil Cates, who runs the StJosephStatue.com website, where hopeful home sellers can also buy a statue, said the ritual of burying St. Joseph gave people hope in a depressed market.

"St Joseph represents to most a sense of hope. In the current situation, hope is pretty much all we have," Mr Cates said.

Mr Cates said tens of thousands of St Joseph home sales kit are sold each year through his website. Kit purchasers get a free home listing on Cates' website -- but according to testimonials, many don't use the listing because their home sells quickly after they bury the statue.

Each kit includes a small statue of the saint, a brief history of St Joseph, and an instruction book on how to bury him.

"The eight-inch statue was made for a man in Beverly Hills, California. He called us and said, 'We have houses that cost five million dollars here. We need some extra help,"' said Mr Cates.

The statue does not work on its own but in conjunction with prayer and belief, a booklet about St Joseph says.

"Superstition is about magic; it is a false and misplaced belief in the inherent power of things," the booklet says.

"Religious devotion on the other hand involves faith in the power of God. It recognises that everything in life, including the sale of our house, is under the sovereign will of God," it says.

St Joseph as a sales aid is not reserved for Christians, practicing or otherwise.

Dawn Hoernemann of Minnesota had her mother "do the praying for me because I am not a religious person."

She sold her one-bedroom house, which had been on the market for five months, within a week of burying St Joseph.

Derderian of the National Cathedral shop said: "It's not only Catholics who buy the statues."

The most popular story for how St. Joseph went from humble carpenter to patron saint of home sellers is that Teresa of Avila, a 16th century Carmelite nun, buried a St. Joseph medallion to help her acquire land and the funds needed to build a convent.

Mr Cate has received hate mail from people who said the practice of burying St. Joseph was steeped in superstition.

"There is no magic to it. It's about getting beyond ourselves and calling on something larger than we are for help," Mr Cates said.

Washington realtor Diane Scanlon told AFP that a Catholic priest refused to bless one of her clients' St. Josephs, saying he was not "into voodoo."

June Gardner, another real estate agent in Washington, gave a St. Joseph statue to a client whose house had been on the market for months.

The client sold the house. "I'm sure it was my St. Joseph," Gardner said.

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