A continuing compendium of tips and tricks from Home & Garden Television:Say goodbye to the days when baking a batch of cookies and putting out fresh flowers before an open house would be enough to sell your home. In today's market, it takes more than that to attract buyers, and frustrated home sellers are resorting to some unusual methods to get their homes noticed. From clever to downright bizarre, here are our 10 favorite unusual home-selling tactics.1. Hold an open-house party. Open houses are the norm when selling a home, but some sellers are upping the ante on the open house by offering wine, catered food, live music and prizes.2. Take home staging to the extreme. Feng shui stagers rearrange the elements of a home to improve its chi, or energy.3. Help serious buyers with financing. Sellers have a few options when it comes to assisting buyers with financing, including offering lease-to-own deals, offering financing themselves, paying for closing costs or paying for points to lower the interest rate.4. Have a little faith. Burying statues or medals of St. Joseph in the earth is a tradition that dates back hundreds of years. Most recently, home sellers have been burying the patron saint of family and household needs in their yards to help their homes sell faster.5. Throw in some extravagant extras. Sellers are throwing in all kinds of goodies, like free cars, vacations, pricey home upgrades and monetary incentives like a year's mortgage or a furniture stipend.6. Make your home a grand prize. After conventional methods fall short, some sellers are holding raffles and essay contests and giving their homes to the winners.7. Get Web-savvy. Some sellers are auctioning off their homes on eBay, while others are swapping properties through sites like Pad4Pad.com and DomuSwap.com.8. Let your house do the talking. Sellers and agents are using the Talking House radio transmitter, which allows you to record a customized message about the features of your home. Buyers can tune into a radio station to hear this message as they drive by your house.9. Put your house on the auction block. Auctions are no longer just for homes that have been foreclosed on.10. Let buyers sleep on it. For serious potential buyers who are on the fence about buying your home, let them sleep on it, literally. By letting buyers spend the night in your home, you're allowing them to get the full experience of living there. A trial run could be just what they need to sign on the dotted line. Be sure to consult with your real estate agent or attorney first.Tips courtesy of frontdoor.com.(For thousands of other ideas visit www.hgtv.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)
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