WSJ columnist June Fletcher reports:
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With housing woes in the headlines daily, more people are asking for help from a higher power to sell their homes.

StJosephStatue.com, a Modesto, Calif., company that creates plastic statues that many believers in the powers of saints bury upside down in their back yards to help sell their homes, has released a new quarterly index comparing the company’s sales to the Case-Shiller Home Price Index, published by Standard & Poors. The index (click chart below to enlarge index) shows the correlation between sales of the statues and sales of homes in the country’s top 20 housing markets, from late 2005, when the housing market began to unwind, until spring 2008.
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Not surprisingly, statue sales are doing best in places where housing prices have done the worst, and are on the rise in 17 of the 20 markets. (For more about St. Joe see our post St. Joseph’s to Work, Home Sellers Have to ‘Have Faith’)

Phil Cates, a mortgage broker who founded the statue company 17 years ago, won’t release annual revenue figures. But he says buyers of statues aren’t necessarily religious, even though St. Joseph is a Catholic saint.

In fact, statue sales are best in the south Atlantic region, which isn’t particularly a Catholic enclave — but is an area with sagging sales.

Customers spend $9.95 for a four-inch-high statue with plastic burial bag, muslin tote bag, and a color booklet explaining the tradition of burying the saint (patron of the family and household needs), which was begun hundreds of years ago in Europe by nuns. Although critics decry the front-yard burials as mere superstition, Mr. Cates says he has customers from all denominations — especially since he throws in a free home listing on his Web site for everyone who buys one of his kits. His best customers, particularly these days, are real estate agents. “They buy in bulk,” he says.