New tricks for selling a home

Beth and Tom Henderson knew they had found their next home when the house spoke to them. Literally.

While driving around St. Paul, Minn., the couple spotted a “talking house” sign on a street corner listing a radio frequency. Flipping on the radio, they quickly found the broadcast.

“Come visit me,” said a real estate agent's sales pitch, with up-tempo jazz in the background. The message then described the home's warmth, cozy fireplace and significant details.

The Talking House program is one of several new tactics that sellers are turning to in hopes of getting their properties noticed. Trying to get an edge in a buyers’ market, sellers are also clearing out any bad spirits that might be living in the house with New Age ghostbusting, or digging up the past to create personalized home histories.

With mortgage rates rising and a flood of unsold homes on the market, home sales are down 17 percent from last year, according to the U.S. Commerce Department.

The Talking House (talkinghouse.com) uses a transmitter the size of a VCR to give a property its own radio channel. The broadcast reaches 300 feet from the house and lets buyers tune in to a sales pitch on their car radios. A few well-placed signs let passersby know where to tune in.

Steve MacLean, the real estate agent in White Bear Lake, Minn., who made the Talking House broadcast heard by the Hendersons, said the broadcast helped him score the sale. The house had been on the market for close to a year and had been listed with three rival brokers. After he set up the message, the Hendersons went into contract on the property within five weeks.

The radio message triples the number of visitors to open houses, said John Combs, a Baldwin, N.Y., real estate agent who uses the transmissions for many listings. He also broadcasts from his office so that people can listen to his choice listings. “It tells people in the community who you are when you aren’t there,” he said.

For Combs, radio broadcasts are only one part of his multimedia offerings. For some properties, he’ll bring in a photographer for a complete 360-degree online virtual house tour or make a DVD video for potential buyers.

Once a potential buyer is in the door, a personalized history of the house can help drive a sale. Sellers are increasingly hiring historians to uncover their property’s past. Since people often buy homes for emotional reasons, knowing the intimate details of a home's former owners or architectural history can make it stand out in a crowd, said Dave Burrell, a house historian in Denver. Burrell has written about 25 house histories this year for homeowners for fees ranging from $200 to $1,200.

Carol Chua, a real estate agent in Pasadena, Calif., who routinely hires a house historian, says having the house's history on hand for buyers can speed up a sale and increase the selling price by 10 percent to 15 percent. Her historian of choice, Tim Gregory, a historical preservationist and former librarian, has written more than 1,500 house histories.

Sometimes, homes sit on the market for months for no good reason. That’s when some sellers look to supernatural or New Age tactics. Realtors sometimes call an expert to “de-clutter” and harmonize a space haunted with bad energy. Negative energy is a catchall that may include anything from generally bad karma, to angry vibes from a previous tenant, to even the haunting aura of an ex-husband.

One process called “space clearing” is inspired by feng shui, the Chinese system of aligning furniture, plants and architecture. Clearing techniques may include a ceremony with Balinese bells, colorful mandalas and hand clapping.

Lynn Davis, an interior designer from Scarsdale, N.Y., was skeptical about the value of the ceremony, but she was growing desperate after her house had been on the market for more than a year with three different agents. Davis called Gregg Nodelman, a Danbury, Conn., space clearer. Nodelman spent several hours clearing the space, “and it was sold in three weeks,” Davis said.

The service doesn’t come cheap. Sondra Shaye, a Brooklyn-based energy clearer and former lawyer who has “cleared” houses across North America, says it takes around four or five hours for her to sanctify a five-bedroom townhouse into a "sacred space" at a cost of $125 an hour.

In some cases, real estate agents recommend a “smudger” to clear out “negative energy.”

“Smudging,” rooted in Native American purification ritual, involves the burning of sacred plants. Eleni Santoro, a New York resident, has been smudging homes for 15 years for real estate agents across the country. In her purification ceremony, she burns lavender and ginger incense sticks, plays Japanese drum music and channels light with her hands.

Real estate agents sometimes use smudgers but don’t tell clients, especially for properties that have been on the market for a long time. Wendy Sorensohn, an agent at the Corcoran Group, one of New York’s largest real estate firms, says the agency brought in Santoro before moving into its new office space.

“A lot of agents may be skeptical,” she said, “but everyone wanted Eleni to clear the space before we moved in.”

E-mail: dlr2113@columbia.edu