Bury pottery in your yard? What a crock! Everyone knows that the not-so-secret secret of real estate is location etc., and if you want to move your place fast the best place to locate it is in San Jose, CA (St. Joe’s?) or one of the other cities in Silicon Valley. (Last week one local radio station told the story of a real estate agent who listed a tear-it-down-and-start-over house in the nice, old-town region of Willow Glen (San Jose) for ~$475,000 and sold it in a week for ~$580,000. Sigh.)
The next best thing (around here) you can do is follow the prescriptions of the ancient Chinese belief-system called feng shui - not because it necessarily works, but because you will triple your pool of prospective buyers by making your house feng-shui-friendly.
After (or, if you insist, instead of) that, you’re better off going with the usual suspects: new bathrooms, new paint, upgraded kitchen, move the furniture out to make the rooms look bigger, get the crap out of the garage and into public storage, trim the yard, etc. And if you’re thinking of changing the carpets pray that you have nice old hardwood floors under them instead - that’s in right now.
…On the other hand, prayer and a $9.95 statue is cheaper and easier…
We sold our house in San Jose in 1962, and I think it went for $29,000. Big four bedroom house with cherry trees in the front and walnut trees in the backyard. That was before it was Silicone Valley, though. Damn.
Hmmm. So over the years the St. Joe statues should logically accumulate. You could have your own little buried army in the backyard, like the ones found in China or somewhere. With some erosion you could have your own Easter Island thing going on. Little mysterious heads for future anthropologists to wonder at. Wonder away, little anthropologists; you ain’t figuring this nonsense out.
I’m not a Catholic, but I heard about the St. Joseph statue thing from a Franciscan priest. In his version, you dig up the saint after the sale. His take on the effectiveness? “Hey, it couldn’t hoit!”