It will take a miracle to sell your home

For more than 500 years, home sellers have turned to Jesus' earthly father for help locating a buyer. Like a litmus test, sales of his 4-inch statues -- which sellers plant head down on their property -- ebb and flow with the tides of the real estate market.

Lately, they've been flying off Christian gift store shelves. And sellers testify they've turned into believers.

"Whether it is divine intervention or faith -- or who knows? -- definitely something is working," said Brian Moore, a Glendale real estate agent.

Moore, who was raised Catholic, first heard about the St. Joseph phenomenon six months ago from a colleague who, like him, was having trouble selling a home.

Moore bought and buried a statue on each of six properties he was listing. Each entered escrow that week.

Because some people think the practice is a silly superstition, Moore said, he sometimes buries the statues without telling the homeowner.

"You don't know how people will react," he said. "But I believe that it works -- absolutely."

I wrote this article for the LA Daily News two summers ago, after the housing market had begun to stall but long before it shorted out. At this point, I think most hopeful sellers have given up on St. Joseph, too.

Ave Maria and the pizza man's unanswered prayers

Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino's Pizza, has been receiving a lot of attention for his ambitious -- and pious -- community-building project in Florida. One of my favorite writers at The New Yorker penned this piece last February about Monaghan's plans to build a Catholic seminary and city based on Catholic values, both bearing the name Ave Maria.

But, in another long piece, Portfolio reports that Ave Maria's in need of a miracle. (Cliche writing intentionally added.)

Monaghan and his partners—the Barron Collier Co., a major Florida real estate firm, and Pulte Homes, the country's third-largest residential builder—say it's too early to judge the viability of the project, which, after all, is still in its infancy. But the circumstances of Ave Maria's birth could not be more challenging. It was conceived in 2001, at the onset of the real estate boom, during which the median home price in Naples would double in just five years. The developers were originally hoping to construct 1,000 houses a year at Ave Maria, reaching a goal of 11,000 over the next decade, while also creating parks, shops, restaurants, and 500,000 square feet of office space. That's not going to happen, at least not at the pace the developers had hoped, for reasons that are both symbolic of wider market conditions and peculiar to the unique—and controversial—nature of Monaghan's project.

Ave Maria is coming into being at the dawn of the worst real estate recession since the early 1990s, in a place that could fairly be called the epicenter of the bust. According to one recent study, the Naples area is the spot in America most at risk for a steep drop in home prices. But the deeper problem may be a conflict between Monaghan and his partners over Ave Maria's identity. At this perilous juncture in the town's existence, they can't agree about how Catholic it should be. Barron Collier and Pulte, both of which are far more interested in profits than prophets, are downplaying the role of religion in the town's development, marketing Ave Maria as a place no more intrinsically Catholic than St. Louis or Corpus Christi, Texas.

But Monaghan and the believers who surround him say that the town's religious character is its great strength, not only spiritually but commercially. They worry that by pitching the development to home buyers as just another anodyne suburb, Barron Collier and Pulte risk alienating the very people most inclined to make Ave Maria their home. "I wonder sometimes whether they don't treat this as if it's the same as every other development they do," Monaghan says of his secular partners. "I think if they put a lot of money into marketing to the general population, they might be wasting a lot of it."

Early indications suggest he may be right.

Which raises the question of the day: Would you want to live in a town of not only homogeneous religious beliefs but also moral values?

'Don't have the house of the Lord in sub-prime loans'

When my wife and I sold our condo two years ago and returned to LA, we looked at homes but decided to sit on the sidelines and wait for the market to settle. Good decision. What a mess that beautiful bubble has become. The median-priced home sold in Los Angeles in September was $25,000 lighter than in August and the number of sales was down 30 percent!

The downturn has been fueled by sub-prime loans, which, obvious to anyone in California, were used not just by the poor but also those who wanted to stretch for a bigger home. Even Christian lenders got involved in the sub-prime market, though not as commonly as other mortgage companies, and I've got a piece about how the tailspin is affecting these financial institutions in the current issue of Christianity Today.

HomeBanc Corp. brought a Christian ethos to the seemingly lucrative market of sub-prime home loans. Flush with a staff of believers, the Atlanta-based company opened meetings in prayer and counted a megachurch founder its head of human resources.

But in mid-August, the company, which Fortune magazine ranked the 67th-best to work for earlier this year, filed for bankruptcy, reportedly laying off most of its 1,100 employees and closing 22 branch offices.

HomeBanc's demise was brought on by the same factor that led to its rise—a housing market that expanded, then shrank, on the back of risky home loans. Other Christian lenders felt the pinch, too. But unlike HomeBanc, most weathered the storm well, buoyed by the security of limiting loans for homebuyers.

The Evangelical Christian Credit Union, the largest Christian lender (and, with more than $1 billion in core assets, a rival to the largest secular lenders to nonprofits), never entered the home market. Other Christian lenders protected their home loans by staying away from sub-prime lending.

"Because of what we stand for and because of who we serve, we can't afford to put people into those loans," said Linda Tashiro, chief operating officer of the San Dimas, California-based Christian Community Credit Union. "We have to sleep at night."