Another great real estate resource for “for sale by owner” real estate sellers is the site at www.HouseZooks.com. HouseZooks gives sellers access to information and services critical to selling a home or property. Tools available at HouseZooks include home valuation, local area statistics information and resources, mortgage rate information and calculators and closing cost estimation. Through HouseZooks you also can purchase reduced rate FSBO advertising and marketing on the local Realtor Multiple Listing Service for most areas of the country and/or advertisement on the leading real estate websites and portals. The online Real Estate Store at HouseZooks offers by owner sellers products such as For Sale signs, key lockboxes, virtual tours and other items designed to assist in the home selling process.
Selling your Greensboro home this year? Now’s the time with the Spring season and real estate beginning to rebound. Selling by owner in Greensboro right now takes special planning and attention to marketing. You’ll need to get the maximum exposure possible for your home in order to attract enough buyers to effect a sale.
Newspaper ads used to be the best way to tell the world about your home for sale by owner, but today’s real estate market is dominated by the Internet. Over 80% of home buyers now use the Internet when buying a home. One look at the major search sites like Realtor.com, Zillow.com, Trulia.com and others and you can quickly see why. You can preview homes in greater detail online than you ever could with print advertisements. Virtual tours, podcasts, multiple photos, Google Street View® mapping all combine to make property search more accessible and enlightening.
So what do you need to do to ensure that your home gets listed on the top real estate websites without spending a fortune? Bloomkey.com now offers listing on the top real estate websites for a low flat-fee of just $249.00! Now you can get more exposure for your home than if it was listed with a real estate agent and still save your home’s equity. Buyers can find and view details about your property from anywhere in the world. And, you’ll get a faster sale at a higher price because you’ve created the demand you need to get the home sold.
Flat fee MLS also provides significantly higher marketing exposure than FSBO. The reason is simple – most buyers go to real estate agents using the MLS to purchase a home. In fact, the most recent comprehensive study showed that over 75% of home buyer’s use a real estate agent when purchasing a home.
Flat fee MLS offers for sale by owner home sellers the best of both worlds. A relatively recent entry to the real estate brokerage industry, a flat fee MLS listing allows home sellers to place their property in the Realtor MLS and on Realtor.com for an upfront fee (usually in the $500 range) instead of paying a whopping 6% commission at closing. A flat fee MLS listing allows a home seller to lower their price and still, maximize their net return. Studies show that a MLS listing increases the odds of selling a home by providing the highest marketing exposure possible. Higher exposure means a greater demand and consequently a higher price.
Here’s how it works: Instead of listing with a traditional broker, find a flat fee broker offering MLS entry only listing of homes for sale. (for a nationwide listing of flat rate brokers visit www.Bloomkey.com). A flat fee broker will enter your property into the Multiple Listing Service in your area where it can be viewed by all of the real estate agents as well as their buyers. If a buyer’s agent brings you a buyer, you pay them 1/2 of the normal commission amount, generally around 3%. For every $100,000 of your sales price, you save approximately $2,500. That means on an average $200,000 home, you can lower the sales price by about $5,000 and still net the same amount of money from the sale as if you had used a traditional real estate agent. Of course, all other factors being equal, a house selling for $195,000 sells before one selling for $200,000 in any market.
