Finally……Zillow doing what I believed they were going to do all along (see my winning comment on the Inman News Blog What is Zillow competition from 10 months ago). So what will the impact be? Is this the beginning of the end for the traditional real estate model? Do we have a […]

According to the new 2006 National Association of REALTORS (NAR) Home Buyer and Seller Survey there is a downtrend in For Sale by Owner transactions”¦. but is this an accurate statement? It’s important to note that the NAR represents their paying REALTOR members not the general public. Much like a labor union fights for […]

Here is an excellent paper on real estate commission model. It’s well worth downloading and reading. It’s main point is that the inefficiency in real estate costs consumers 30 billion dollars a year. Already it is raising issues within the real estate agent community such as Inman Blog, where this great post is […]

You’ve heard it quoted hundreds of times”¦ “The median home price for sellers who use an agent is 16.0 percent higher than a home sold directly by an owner; $230,000 vs. $198,200;” This figure comes from the NAR 2005 Buyer and Seller Profile. This figure is quoted religiously by the real […]

Here is a good article on pricing your home correctly from the WSJ. The article basically states that pricing your home accurately is the single most important thing to getting it sold. They indicate to use round number prices as this makes the property appear on more search, i.e. a $275,000 price will […]

Here is a Washington Post article on selling your home for sale by owner. There is some good information which is all fairly basic. Probably the biggest take-away from the article is the time you will need to invest into selling your home for sale by owner. We have created a FSBO savings […]

Those of you who read our blog know that we have covered the topic regarding the buyers agent real estate commission a few times and how many people don’t realize there is a cost of using an buyers agent even if they tell you it’s free. Since this is a FSBO / pro-consumer blog […]

Cnn reports that new home sales are actually up for the first time in 5 months while actual median price is down 1.3% over last year. I suspect part of that reason may be due to the builder aggressively courting real estate agents again… and I mean aggressively. There are some projects where builders […]

Not surprising the NAR release it’s existing home sales data which reported a 1.7% decrease in the median home price. This is the first drop since 1995 and is the largest drop since 1993. This is pretty significant news especially for those currently in the market, buying or selling. I have a […]

Homethinking, a great realtor rating site, posted an interesting article on why some states have higher concentration of FSBO’s than others. According to the informal study, there were 3,031 people per FSBO in Michigan while California was 32,177. The article continues on to ask why some states have such a high concentration […]