By-owner sites

A - FSBO (For-Sale-By-Owner) sites: What are their pros and cons?

Posting your home on a site of by-owner homes offers the highest commission savings potential. They offer a variety of services and come with a number of different pricing options. 

 Overview of By-Owner sites:

By-owner web sites allow you to upload information and picture(s) of your home for viewing by prospective buyers. They cover a specific metro area, a region, a state or the entire country.

Builders, lenders (foreclosed homes) and even homes listed with real estate agents often dominate a web site. You want a site that is composed of homes from for-sale-by-owners.

Many "nationwide" web sites exist, but none of them dominate the marketplace. Some actually "share" their listings with each other.

Hundreds of local or regional sites actually provide a lot of advantages over the nationwide ones.

Web sites offer significant benefits:

1) POPULARITY    They're used by many buyers during their search.

2) SIMPLICITY       Enter the info once and the work is finished.

3) AVAILABILITY   Information is available to buyers 24/7.

4) VALUE                Less costly than other advertising.

5) INFORMATIVE   Effectively provides the most information.

6) FEATURES         Can display multiple pictures of the property
     
7) COMPETITIVE     In essence, FSBO sites are the owner's answer to the real estate agent's massive site of homes for sale.                                        

In addition, some sites offer owners auxiliary services: for-sale signs, open house sign-in sheets, information boxes, lock boxes, generic contracts, etc.

Where these sites fall short:

Growing pains

The number of FSBO sites has undergone explosive growth since 2000. They come in varying degrees of quality, services, pricing, coverage area, inventory quantity and just plain effectiveness.

With so many different nationwide sites, what are the odds buyers will see your home? After all, each one has just a partial list of the FSBO homes that are on the market.

Unclear on objective

Focus on the home page of these sites. Do you have to hunt around to find where the buyers begin their search for homes?Searching for homes–isn’t that their purpose? Too many sites focus on appealing to the seller, trying to get them to sign up for their service. After all, that’s who pays to be posted on their site. When selecting a site, look for one that would appeal to buyers.

Obsolete information

Many sites display out-dated and sold listings because owners withdraw from the market or sell their home but don’t notify the web site to delete the listing. This results in buyers making worthless phone calls. After being stung several times, the buyers may give up searching on that site.

Effectively using these sites:

Do your homework

Call or email a few sellers on web sites you’re considering. Is the phone number still valid? Do they respond to your email? Tell them you’re thinking of using the web site. Find out if they have had inquiries; lack of calls could be a sign that the site suffers from obsolete inventory, a real buyer turn-off. 

You may have to post your home on several sites. But there are many inexpensive ones.

Target your approach

A great feature some sites have is to assign the sellers a reference number they can use in their printed advertising. Buyers then input this number on the site's homepage or into their browser and link directly to information about your home. This eliminates having the buyer search through a lot of listings or having to key in selection criteria to get to the info and pictures of your home.

Unfortunately, just like the Realtor’s web site, searching introduces the risk that buyers will get distracted from your property information as they look at all the other homes on the market.

Get double use out of your site

Direct buyers to your web site in your newspaper advertising (as well as your flyers). Your ad could include, “More info/pics at FSBOePower.com#12345.”

Use Nationwide or local sites ? 

Use both. Since the majority of buyers are local, they will be more familiar with local sites from having seen sellers refer to them in newspaper classifieds, on Craigslist and on info box fliers. A list of those in your area can be found here. It never hurts to use more than one of these sites.