For Sale By Owner

The year of 2007 continued the gloom set in the real estate market late in 2005 with home sellers finding it difficult to push their properties through MLS, FSBO and flat-fee brokerage arrangements. MLS listings carried a heavy inventory of unsold properties for months even in areas that showed consistency of fast selling in the previous years.

The home sellers who first got the wind that their properties are not moving as expected were scared and spread the news to others which made the situation still worse. Those who were intending to embark on selling of their homes took up the cue and to save the hefty commission payable as brokerage, out of the already shortened sale proceeds expected, changed their plans to try FSBO route. Yet another new phenomenon opened up as flat-fee brokerage, where the brokers and agents saw the opportunity to get more customers and thereby more business in a sluggish market. The brokers accepted this arrangement for listing the properties in MLS for a time bound schedule with a nominal amount as flat-fee brokerage for this service. All other services related to home selling like showing up the properties, negotiating the price and closing the deal were left to the home owners themselves for handling.

The inundation of foreclosure properties into the market continued unabated in 2007 and worst still they were growing in large numbers month after month. At the close of 2007, there were more than 2 million homes sliding into the foreclosure process. The pressure on prices of secondary homes advertised through MLS, FSBO and flat-fee brokerage sale was mounting as never-before.

The projection by market watchers and realtors of expertise for 2008 was also not encouraging during the end of last year. They indicated that the re-setting of adjustable rates of mortgages borrowed by home owners in the years of housing market boom, will be telling badly in 2008 before close. As an after-effect of this, some 1 million home owners additionally will be forfeiting their properties to foreclosure demon. The home selling will feel the pinch with markets going further down in prices and activity.

This is now got confirmed by the results of new industry data released by the National Association of Realtors. According to it, in December 2007 the home sales in U.S. fell by 1.5% to 85.9%. This figure is a fall from the November figure of 87.2% and second next only to the record low of 85.5% turned out in August 2007.

However there is a ray of hope as predicted by experts that the Index will hit 88% soon. The forecast for overall home sales in 2008 will touch, according to predictions, the 5.4 million mark in 2008, slightly lower than that of 2007 which was 5.7 million.