Advanced Access promotes ForSaleByOwner.com
In a snafu to all their paying clients, Advanced Access elected to include an article in their February newsletter promoting ForSaleByOwner.com . I wonder how many agents missed it and sent it to their clients before AA was blasted for including something that takes away from Realtors® income and replaced it with something more appropriate.
Here’s an excerpt of the article:
How to Sell Your Home in a Tight Market
(ARA) – Now that the New Year is underway, a lot of people are wondering what 2008 has in store for the real estate market. Industry experts say it could be a tough year for people who put their home on the market.
With more than 4.2 million homes currently on the market and more to come as spring “selling season” arrives, home prices are falling to entice buyers to get off the sidelines. Buyers, of course, are drawn to houses offering the best deal for the money. With home prices threatening to go lower or, at best, remain unchanged, many home sellers are concerned about selling their home for less than it was worth just a year or two ago. Add to that the fact that real estate agents typically eat up five to six percent of a home’s sales price, and that’s even less money that will go to the seller.
This probably explains why many sellers are choosing to forgo working with an agent and save on commission, allowing them to price their homes more competitively. There are now more people using ForSaleByOwner.com, the nation’s largest Web site for these home sellers, than at any other time in the company’s history.
There’s big money to be saved. An analysis performed by the company found that real estate agents and brokers collected $55 billion in commissions in 2007, an average of $13,900 per home sold. People like Joseph De Luca of Enfield, Conn., question the wisdom of paying so much when, with a little effort, he could do the job himself and save thousands of dollars.
“An agent is going to market the home by putting a yard sign out front, posting an ad on the Internet and holding a few open houses. Why pay a five or six percent commission when I can do that myself,” asks De Luca.
Instead of spending thousands on an agent, he invested $249 to market his three-bedroom home on ForSaleByOwner.com. DeLuca’s listing package included a guidebook to selling your own home, and other resources to walk him through the entire real estate process. He also received a ForSaleByOwner.com yard sign that signaled potential buyers to view his home on the Internet, and a home appraisal report that compared his home to others in the area and gave him market information so that he could price his home accurately.
De Luca noticed that similar homes in his neighborhood were listed at more than $340,000 and hadn’t moved. Figuring that he was saving on commissions, he sold his house for $335,000 within 45 days. Had he gone with a commissioned agent, it would have had to sell for $355,000 in order for him to pocket the same amount. “I’ll never use a real estate agent again,” De Luca proudly says.
Another ForSaleByOwner.com customer, Bruce Brandywine of Tampa, Fla., attracted a buyer who saw his online ForSaleByOwner.com property ad and toured it during an open house that he hosted himself. “Who knows my home and can possibly explain its features and attributes better than myself?” he asked rhetorically. To close the deal and give him piece of mind that nothing was overlooked, he hired a real estate attorney to handle all of the necessary paperwork.
Brandywine is not the only one choosing to skip the “middleman.” ForSaleByOwner.com estimates that ‘for sale by owner’ sellers saved almost $9 billion in home value during 2007.
“The real estate market is expected to be tough for at least the first half of 2008, so we expect more people will avoid using a commissioned agent in order to price their home competitively and save more of their home’s value.” says Eric Mangan, director of consumer relations at ForSaleByOwner.com.
Whether you’re planning to sell in the near future, or are looking to buy, log on to www.ForSaleByOwner.com for the help you need today.
Courtesy of ARA Content
Filed under: Outrage | Tagged: Finance, Income, internet, Marketing, Social Networking, Software, Technology
Hey Gene - that article was never sent out. It was accidentally loaded instead of the “Four Ways to Find a Contractor You Can Love” article but was changed out before the Feb 1st send out. So you must have seen it in a preview before we got a chance to change it out. I checked my IntelliCards acct and can confirm the FSBO article is not in there. I confirmed with a collegue that it was indeed changed before any were sent out.
If you have questions, of course check with the folks in the office, but I thought I’d just help since I could with this one
Anna - AA is doing some back-peddling on this one!
“We did catch the problem in the Intellicards February newsletter the very next morning after having published it and were already in the process of correcting the problem prior to it being mentioned….”
That’s a bit different than what you posted and WAS sent out since agents clients DID receive it. Now AA is attempting to say it’s just another snafu since they weren’t supposed to be emailed until 2/1. When does it stop and somebody steps up and says “We screwed up!” It makes it rather obvious that AA doesn’t create their own newsletters or this would never have happened in the first place.
Gene - I was just typing what I saw in my acct - I am out of the office as I mentioned before, so if it went out then I must have misspoken. I was just being a lookout in my own acct - not speaking for AA.
How is that Affinity Partnership with Kansas doing? Oh, nevermind, they dropped their partership with AA like a bad habit. And the newest email about 35,000 clients… Haha. Why don’t they disclose in their newsletter that they are counting an agent with a site, IC, and QH as 3 different accounts. Too embarrased to say they have lost clients and are hemorrhaging money. What happened to the Outside Sales department? No Jane, no Larry, no hope? I guess those used car salesmen were harder to replace than the telemarketing donkeys that are currently pulling one over on the helpless agents who are too detached from technology to do any research on AA.
The AA forums are dead, not many people there. I asked a question about blogger.com. I had read that you can’t even find blogspot on google, which I didn’t understand since it was a google tool. The moderator answered another poster’s question who posted after me, but didn’t answer me. Gosh.
I have been trying a free p2 site but haven’t had any luck. I guess I need to take the plunge and get the upgrade and drop AA.
You’re right on the money about the forums being dead! Since Anna went on maternity leave many questions go unanswered due to staffing cutbacks.
Yet, if you read this months Marketing Tips it says “Our Customer Service is Second to None! ” I think that many of their clients would beg to differ with this statement.
As far as your P2 site, I have seen several sites rank #1 for their keywords without upgrading. Spend some time on P2’s forum and find out what it is you need to do to improve it. If you haven’t had any luck with either AA or P2 you probably need to hire someone to work on your sites seo or you will continue to just throw your money away.