A condominium building under construction in Brooklyn has its own MySpace page. "Scorpio" structure seeks "great people from the Metro area, and beyond, that want to live in a thriving community."

Some garden apartment rentals in New Jersey and a condo complex in Orange County, NewYork, have their own blogs.

In Stamford, Conneticut, the developer of a super-high-end condo tower is eschewing use of free classified-ad listings on craigslist.com to lure buyers, since "every mom-and-pop building these days is doing it."

But the company is putting big money into a virtual tour for its project Web site.

"A lot of people do all their home shopping online, start to finish," said Kelly Marzullo of Core Marketing Group, which is using the Web to promote various Manhattan buildings and the Peninsula at City Place in Edgewater, New Jersey. "A US$15,000 ad in the Sunday paper just won't get you anywhere anymore. People like to know everything about a building before they come in -- or at least have a taste and a feel."

Her Manhattan-based company does advertise properties on craigslist, building in links to Web pages that may include photographs, digital drawings, video, floor plans and the range of asking prices.

In New Jersey, Marzullo said, she sees digital marketing appealing mainly to the young and Web-smart people who might pull up to a building on a motorcycle with a Blackberry in their pocket.

But Jason and Bobby Schlesinger, principals of Ceebraid-Signal, which is putting up the Highgrove condo in Stamford where the starting price is US$1.4 million, beg to differ.

"One might make the mistake that the empty-nester clientele is not Internet-savvy, but we find more and more of our mature buyers come in with highly specific questions, having already done their research online," Jason Schlesinger said.

The Schlesingers said they were shelling out well over US$100,000 on a two-and-a-half minute video to be posted on the Highgrove Web site.

They are keeping their budget for print ads, they said, because the primary ways people first hear about a project continue to be traditional -- signs, newspapers and home magazines.

So are other developers in the tristate area; these include Savanna Partners, which is building 125 North 10th Street, a complex in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, being promoted on MySpace, and Robert Martin Co, which is converting an old pencil factory in Jersey City into the Residences at Dixon Mills.

Nationally, however, real estate companies are spending 26 percent more on online advertising this year, even as total real estate ad spending declined 3 percent, research company Borrell Associates said.

Bobby Schlesinger says the main point of creating the online video of the Highgrove is to showcase its exterior design and amenities. The building, set in downtown Stamford, was designed by Yale University's dean of architecture, Robert Stern, and will offer fitness facilities, a wine cellar and tasting rooms and an indoor pool with a retractable roof.

Once people sample the wares online, a contract can follow amazingly fast, both developers and shoppers said.

Heath Waldorf was dead set on not paying a broker's fee to find a two-bedroom place for himself and his fiancee, Nicole Lelchuk, in Hoboken. So he spent more than a month last summer visiting buildings that had signs and checking out ads in the paper, before hitting on the idea of craigslist, where he had shopped for Yankees tickets and once sold a piece of furniture.

Instantly, Waldorf spied an ad for a rental at the Upper Grand development -- which, as it turned out, had been posted only 10 minutes before. It was for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in a new elevator building with a gym, offering hardwood floors, walk-in closets, stainless steel appliances -- and a balcony, something Waldorf had his heart set on.

Waldorf got up and rushed over.

"Because of the slow market they were offering 13 months for the price of 12, and waiving the US$350 amenities fee," he said.

A handful of large developers, WCI and Lennar among them, are even starting to offer Web-trolling buyers instantaneous "live chat" with sales agents -- 24 hours a day.

WCI, which has developments of all sizes, types and price ranges around the Northeastern US and Florida, strives to make a captivating "first impression" with its interactive site, said Gabe Pasquale, its chief marketing officer.

Users who proceed to click on developments in a particular state, or of a specific type, view an online brochure and then can click to chat or be hooked up with a sales agent.

"We're selling a lifestyle with each project and people want specifics before they invest any significant amount of time," Pasquale said.

Eight months ago, James Gandolfini drove his white SUV out of the parking lot of Satriale's for the last time, as HBO wrapped up the final season of "The Sopranos."

Now, the building has followed the same fate as the popular show.

It's gone.

Last month, owner Manny Costeira demolished the structure, home to a fictional pork store where TV mobster Tony Soprano and his Jersey crew hung out on the acclaimed mob drama. On TV, a life-sized pig sat atop the building.

"We whacked the pork store," said Costeira, who leased the empty building to HBO.

Nine condo units will replace former storefront. The project is called "The Soprano," and prices range from $325,000 to $385,000. Construction is expected to start in the spring and would be finished in about a year.

Costeira said he can't sign any contracts because he hasn't received permits; he said he has commitments for at least three units and a waiting list for the rest.

The show, now popular in reruns, was mostly filmed at a New York City sound stage, but many scenes were shot across the Garden State to provide a real Jersey feel. Several sites, including the fake pork store, were shot in Kearny, a working-class town across the Passaic River from Newark and about nine miles west of Manhattan.

Now that Satriale's has been demolished, Costeira has been using the Internet to hawk chunks of cast stone from the facade. He said he's already sold about 1,000 pieces in two sizes, for $25 and $50, to fans as far away as Ireland and New Zealand.

The 2-inch-square smaller chunks are mounted on a black wooden block with an "authentic porkstore" name plate. A "certificate" that accompanies the larger chunks, about a 5-inch-square, promising it came from the building that once stood as "the familiar location of the fictional Satriale's pork store featured on the hit HBO television series 'The Sopranos.' "

"It's quite a little gag gift," Costeira said. "For a real Sopranos fan, it's a real piece of the show. It's a piece of television history."

And the demolished building represents one less piece of television history seen on a popular bus tour of "Sopranos" sites in north New Jersey.

"The loss of Satriale's of course disappoints a few of our guests, but we always make the effort to keep the route evolving to include additional locations and enrich the experience however we can," said tour guide Marc Baron.

Instead of the fake pork store, which was always shuttered, the tour now includes a trip to the Holsten's, a real-life Bloomfield ice cream parlor where the series' final scene was filmed.

"They now sample onion rings at Holsten's, and sit in the booth that Tony sat in," Baron said.

By SARA SCHAEFER MUÑOZ
October 30, 2007; Page D1

Cari Luna is Jewish by heritage and Buddhist by religion. She meditates regularly. Yet when she and her husband put their Brooklyn, N.Y., house on the market this year and offers kept falling through, Ms. Luna turned to an unlikely source for help: St. Joseph.

The Catholic saint has long been believed to help with home-related matters. And according to lore now spreading on the Internet and among desperate home-sellers, burying St. Joseph in the yard of a home for sale promises a prompt bid. After Ms. Luna and her husband held five open houses, even baking cookies for one of them, she ordered a St. Joseph "real estate kit" online and buried the three-inch white statue in her yard.

"I wasn't sure if it would be disrespectful for me, a Jewish Buddhist, to co-opt this saint for my real-estate purposes," says Ms. Luna, a writer. She figured, "Well, could it hurt?"

With the worst housing market in recent years, St. Joseph is enjoying a flurry of attention. Some vendors of religious supplies say St. Joseph statues are flying off the shelves as an increasing number of skeptics and non-Catholics look for some saintly intervention to help them sell their houses.

Some Realtors, too, swear by the practice. Ardell DellaLoggia, a Seattle-area Realtor, buried a statue beneath the "For Sale" sign on a property that she thought was overpriced. She didn't tell the owner until after it had sold. "He was an atheist," she explains. "But he thanked me."

Existing-home sales fell 8% in September to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.04 million units, the lowest level in nearly 10 years, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Statues of St. Joseph sold online can be as tall as 12 inches. One, made of colored resin, portrays St. Joseph cradling the baby Jesus. Yet most home sellers favor the simpler three- or four- inch replicas -- most of which are made in China and often depict St. Joseph as a carpenter.

Most statues come in a "Home Sale Kit" that is priced at around $5 and includes burial instructions and a prayer. One site, Good Fortune Online, recently added another kit with a statue of St. Jude -- known as the patron saint of hopeless causes -- "to help those with a difficult property to sell," the site says. Another site, Stjosephstatue.com, takes orders for its "Underground Real Estate Agent Kits" at 1-888-BURY-JOE.

Demand for the statues has been growing. Ron Weissman, who sells the statues at Good Fortune Online, says about six months ago he switched to online transactions because the increase in calls -- from about two a week to 25 calls a day -- was too much to handle. Richard Weigang, owner of www.catholicstore.com³, says he sells about 400 statues a month, double the amount he sold a year ago.

In Catholicism, St. Joseph, a carpenter, is honored as the husband of Mary and foster father of Jesus. Representing a humble family man, he is the patron saint of home, family and house-hunting, according to the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author of "My Life With the Saints." Popular belief holds that people who wish to enlist St. Joseph's help in selling a house should bury his replica upside-down in the yard. (Apartment dwellers are advised to put him in a potted plant.)

Methods of burying the statue vary. Instructions in one package give buyers several options, including burying it upside-down next to the "For Sale" sign, burying it three feet from the rear of the house and burying it next to the front door facing away from the home. Phil Cates, owner of stjosephstatue.com, says: "I've seen it buried in all types of places with all types of ceremonies." He says the detailed burial instructions are largely intended to prevent people from forgetting where they put their St. Joseph. (His kits advise burying it facing it away from the house, to symbolize leaving.)

Theologians say there's no official doctrine that calls for the statue's interment. The practice may have stemmed from medieval rites of land possession, in which conquerors claimed land by planting a cross or banner, says Jaime Lara, associate professor of Christian Art and Architecture at Yale Divinity School. Mr. Lara also suggests that the tradition may have gotten mixed up at some point with folklore surrounding St. Anthony. St. Anthony, known as a matchmaker, would often be held ransom, upside-down, until he found a husband for someone's daughter, he says.

Some clergy aren't sure how St. Joseph would feel about his replica ending up on its head in the dirt, and suggest displaying it somewhere in the house instead.

"I think it's much more respectful than burying the poor guy," says Msgr. Andrew Connell, the archdiocesan director of the Pontifical Society for the Propagation of the Faith in Boston. Some retailers, such as Mr. Weigang, owner of www.catholicstore.com, also encourage buyers to put the statues in the house.

"We don't advocate burying," he says. "Some of those statues are quite beautiful."

Catholic leaders also say that faith and devotion are necessary, in addition to burying a statue, otherwise the practice amounts to little more than superstition or magic. But they are also enjoying the saint's newfound popularity. "If they have a good result and they think it was St. Joseph, it might inspire them to practice more," says Msgr. Connell.

Once someone's home sells, the custom holds, the statue should be dug up and put in a place of honor in the new home. That's what Ms. Luna did after she and her husband sold their house shortly after burying St. Joseph. She put the statue in her office in their new home in Portland, Ore.

But not everyone is aware of the follow-up step. Trudy Lopez and her husband buried a statue of St. Joseph when they were trying to sell their condo, even though Ms. Lopez is Jewish and her husband is a nonpracticing Catholic. They sneaked out late at night, worried they might be breaking a condo association rule.

"And I'm thinking, 'If my family knew what I am doing, they'd die,' " she says.

Soon they got an offer, but didn't realize they were supposed to bring the statue with them to their new home.

Stirling Sotheby's International Realty agents will soon be able to market properties in Russia to local buyers, while also giving overseas investors access to properties in Central Florida.

Stirling Sotheby's parent company opened a new franchise in Moscow, the company announced Wednesday. The new franchise, part of the Sotheby's network, will offer area agents a chance to capitalize on investors stuck in a high-priced locale, says Roger Soderstrom, owner of the Orlando franchise.

"Moscow has the most expensive real estate per square foot in the world today," Soderstrom told Orlando Business Journal. "[Investors] think our prices in Central Florida are giveaway prices."

Agents in the local office will be networking closely with the new brokerage firm in Moscow and have the ability to work "back and forth with buyers and sellers," he says.

The company plans to also unveil a similar operation in Japan, Soderstrom says.