Earlier this week, a friend sent an article from the Wall Street Journal about burying St. Joseph statues entitled, "When It Takes a Miracle To Sell Your House."  As show in the image above, the story was the MOST EMAILED link on the Wall Street Journal, five rankings ahead of Google's new G-Phone.  Amazing, and amazingly misguided IMHO.

Over the past few years, I've blogged repeatedly about the practice (click to continue reading original links).  In 1998, my initial objections were stated in a well-researched article, which journalists may find worth reading, entitled, "Beyond Superstition: Doing Justice to the 'Just Man'."  Nearly a decade later, I created an interactive map called "St. Joe 2.0:  Geography of Faith" where anyone who believed in the practice could document their prayer experiences to St. Joseph and others could propose alternative spiritual practices.

Then after a Catholic conference on Social Justice was canceled in Boston for lack of interest, my blog posts became more pointed: "Social Justice for Real Estate Dummies."

Unlike NPR's Talk of the Nation which kicked off their program "Selling Your Soul to Sell Your House" with an interview about St. Joseph, the Wall Street Journal told their audience that some Catholics are offended by the practice of burying St. Joseph statues upside down because they believe it is superstitious.  Some Catholic bookstores objective to selling the statues for the same reason.

For years, I've thought about offering a "St. Joseph Statue Buy-Back Program."  An employee of one local religious book store expressed an interest in exchanging statues for coupons to buy books which would give real insight into Catholic teachings.  My recommendation, the day after All Saints' Day, would be The Saints' Guide to Happiness.  (The author, Robert Ellsberg, was a classmate at Harvard and is the son of Daniel Ellsberg.)

Looks like the WSJ blog post is generating some heated discussion.  I'd love to invite anyone who wants to take a more positive approach towards "reinventing" this misguided devotion to St. Joseph to consider our fund raising campaign for AIDS orphans or to propose their own ideas to the honor patron saint of the Catholic church and Social Justice.  Isn't it time sellers, real estate agents, and the press do justice to the "just man"?  Your comments are most welcome here or on our wiki. 

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Real Estate Cafe blog posts on practice of burying St. Joseph statues to sell real estate:

8/23/05:  Leading indicators:  Do sales of St. Joseph statues signal a housing slide?

10/28/05:  Realtors' "Anti-bubble reports" out of sync with emerging buyers' market?

3/26/07:  AIDS orphans sending an S.O.S. to real estate consumers

4/27/07:  Social Justice for Real Estate Dummies

OnPointRadio.org, a nationally syndicated talkshow on NPR, is hosting a program NOW entitled, "The Subprime Mop-Up."  If you live in Greater Boston, you can listen to 90.9FM from 9-10am this morning, Thursday, September 6, 2007, or the rebroadcast tonight from 7-8pm. Beyond Boston, you can also listen to the program LIVE online at the link below, or access the audio anytime later at your convenience:
 
http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2007/09/20070906_a_main.asp

Aired: Thursday, September 06, 2007 10-11AM ET

Program description:  The Subprime Mop-up

If you thought the subprime mortgage mess was behind us, think again. In the next year, another two million adjustable-rate mortgages are scheduled to reset from low "teaser" rates to household budget-busting new highs.

Foreclosure rates are already soaring. In some regions, whole neighborhoods risk going under. A credit crunch backlash has markets around the world in turmoil.

Now Washington is girding to weigh in. But who, if anyone, should be bailed out? Who punished? Who reined in?

This hour On Point: homes, high-rollers, and moral hazards in the subprime mop-up.

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Housing economist Karl Case just ducked a question on the implications of the subprime crisis on housing prices nationwide and Congressman Barney Frank is about to speak.  The complete line-up of guests include:

• Rep. Barney Frank, Democrat from Massachusetts, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee
• Karl Case, professor of economics at Wellesley College and co-author, with Yale's Robert Shiller, of the Case-Shiller Index, the leading database of U.S. housing sales
• Michael Mussa, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and former member of President Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers
• Michael G. Ciaravino, Mayor of Maple Heights, Ohio, a city hit hard by foreclosures

Twelve years ago, The Real Estate Cafe was founded as a walk-in, internet-based, housing information center -- to our knowledge, the first in the country (see story below.)  Over the next five years, 1995-2000, we amassed a mountain of paper files, some in the 1,200 square foot body of the cafe and more in the basement.   

Even though The Real Estate Cafe has operated virtually in recent years, we continue to amass mountains of paper.  About 20 boxes of paper, mostly marketing materials for recent real estate conventions and newspaper articles, are ready to sorted, filed, or tossed today.  Approximately 50 files boxes are already in deep storage.  While we rarely access paper documents in "active" file cabinets, we constantly update digital files on The Real Estate Cafe's intranet.

So our question is three-fold:

1.  Is paper filing obsolete?

2.  Are walk-in real estate offices obsolete?

3.  If real estate brokerages reorganized to operate virtually, would savings be passed onto real estate consumers, both buyers and sellers, in the form of lower commissions, rebates, or fee-for-service business models?

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