FSBO Jane

Finally, I conclude with Buy Owner. Selling your home FSBO is made easy with the help of the Buy Owner team!

Using Buy Owner

Buy Owner’s philosophy is simple: It’s “U” that makes the difference! By selling your home on BuyOwner.com, you are allowing anyone with an Internet connection to view your property. While it is up to you to sell your own home, using Buy Owner leaves the advertising part up to a team of professionals.

1. Professional writers create a descriptive, informative ad detailing your house inside and out, from front to back! Potential buyers can also take a look at photos of your home. If they live out of state or out of the country, there is a convenient virtual tour option.

2. A professional photographer takes high-quality resolution pictures of every inch of your property, top to bottom, inside and out. Buy Owner offers virtual tours so that people may come into your home without literally setting a foot inside the front door! The site also shows you how many people view your listing and allows buyers to get into contact with you. It’s all about the networking!

Real Estate marketing is dependent upon networking. Maximizing your home’s exposure on social network sites is going to be increasingly important as our world continues to thrive on technology. You can have the Internet at home, at the office and even in the palm of your hand on a cell phone! Facebook may be the latest craze, so you must stay on top of the trends. However, if you want professional assistance and guaranteed good service, you can’t beat Buy Owner, the leading FSBO company in the country!

And the series continues! Learn how to market your home using MySpace and YouTube!

MySpace

While Facebook appears to be a little better organized, you can sell a home on MySpace with the same intention: to market to hundreds of thousands of buyers all over the world. Created back in 2003, MySpace is currently the most popular social networking site in the United States. As it competes with Facebook, MySpace strives to be bigger and better, creating similar applications having to with travel, sports, etc. And posting listings on MySpace will also give your house tons of exposure. Here’s how!

1. Design your page. If you don’t know simple html, all you need to do is search Google for a bit! In no time, you will be able to spice up your MySpace page with photos, videos and descriptions of your property. There are plenty of free templates to use if you want your page to have a certain look. You can have a black background with white text, and you can even change the color of your headers and hyperlinks! My advice, however, is to keep it simple. If you have too much going on, people will be aesthetically turned off, and will most likely never look at your page again.

2. Post blogs and bulletins. A MySpace blog is a good place to add some descriptions of your home. This way, you can keep the clutter on your page to a minimum. You might want to include such blog topics as, “Brand-new Appliances,” “Updated Landscaping,” or “Carpet & Flooring Allowance.” Create eye-catching titles! Bulletins are similar to blogs. However, the bulletins are only viewable by your MySpace friends. This is a social networking site, after all. And let’s face it. Your friends are not always going to be looking at your page. They are sure to see a posted bulletin as soon as they log in to their homepage. A great way to get news out into the open is by word of mouth. So if someone sees your bulletin about how you just lowered your asking price, he/she might be inclined to tell his/her neighbor who is looking for a new house in a lower price range! Just imagine the possibilities.

4. Use the Classifieds and keep networking! Powered by Oogle, MySpace classifieds are basically a clone of Craig’s List. So, just like Facebook, MySpace has a place for you to list your property. Use MySpace to your advantage. Drum up new business. Search for other FSBO sellers in your field. You may even find experts that can offer sound advice!

YouTube

YouTube gives potential buyers an inside look at your house. All you need is a digital camera that takes videos. Take a video of each room in your house and upload it to your free YouTube account. My advice is to video each room separately so that you can create a small description for each space to accompany the video. The only disadvantage to this service is that the video quality could be sub-par, and unless you have a tripod, the picture may be a little shaky. However, this is another fantastic way to get your house out on the market and viewable to thousands of people!

Stay tuned for tomorrow, when I share yet another great way to get the word out about your home!

Does Facebook have more to offer than a way to keep in touch with friends and stay updated on who’s dating who? Absolutely! Here are some new ways to use it:

1. Encourage family members and friends to “add” you to their networks. There is no better way for potential buyers to hear testimonials about your property. By word of mouth, your family and friends can help you market to sellers all across the world! The Internet allows you to show your home to a local renter looking to buy or to a bloke in London who needs to move to your city for his new job! Try doing that via newspaper or print magazine.

2. Create a group! For example, let’s say you design a “Chicago Home Buyers” group where you can offer advice to first time buyers or just exchange bits of information with other people in your area. If you’re not an expert, do some research. Send group members to the Buy Owner Blog or even offer your own advice as a current homeowner. Leverage your knowledge to drive traffic to your own property. Your advice may spark someone’s interest in your property; the answer to his/her question might just be to buy your house!

3. Use the Marketplace! Facebook actually has a place for you to list your property. It’s an eBay meets Craig’s List type of thing. When you want to create a new listing, all you need to do to start is to choose from five categories, with “Housing” being one of them. You are then taken to a set of subcategories: Rentals/Apartments, Sublets, Real Estate and Other. If you choose Real Estate, you will then be prompted to enter the necessary information about your house: number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, price, postal code, square footage, etc. Facebook even supplies you with a sample ad. And don’t forget… you can add up to four pictures!

4. If you’re a blogger, add your RSS feed to your profile! Facebook offers hundreds of applications you can put in your profile ranging from sports to travel to blogging! If you type “RSS” into the search, the top two results yielded are the applications titled “Simply RSS” and “Blog RSS Feed Reader.” It’s a great way to drive traffic to your blog and to any properties you might be profiling in it.

When it comes to selling your home, you should be thinking about advertising your property in places where your target markets are located. Don’t discount people living outside of your community. Expand to other cities, states and maybe even other countries! You never know who is looking for a house in your neighborhood. People relocate for jobs, families, relationships and many other personal reasons.

According to Internet World Stats, over one billion people in the entire world use the Internet. This means that, at any given time, almost 22% of the entire world’s population has access to your selling information. Now, is 22% of the world’s population looking for a house in your community? Probably not. But just think about the exposure your home gets when you place an ad on the Internet!

With the Internet becoming one of the primary sources of knowledge and consumer marketing, it seems as though print ads are useless. Buyers are more likely to surf the web for a home instead of picking up a magazine or the classifieds section of the local newspaper. And with increasing popularity of social networking web sites, it only seems fitting to use them to your advantage. Sure, a lot of high school kids might be checking Facebook to see relationship statuses change or to exchange bumper stickers, but more and more people are really profiting from both this site and others like MySpace. People are even attempting to sell their homes via YouTube! Finally, you should consider a For Sale By Owner website like Buy Owner_©.

The next few blogs will be a series of posts, giving you advice on using each site as a marketing tool. Tomorrow, I’ll start with Facebook!

from Chris Ayres, of the LA Times, in his “Loving Your House Again. On how today’s homeowners may be feeling, what with the bad market and lowered home values:

“Chances are, you feel like impaling yourself on the three-pointed star on your real estate agent’s Mercedes. Before you do that, however, consider inflation. At its current unbowdlerized rate of 5%, inflation alone will devalue your million-dollar loan over the next decade to the “real money” equivalent of about $600,000, while at the same time causing your home to appreciate to $1.3 million (according to online inflation calculators).”

In other words, buying a house is still a good decision, all things considered.

Read the rest of the article here.

In case you haven’t heard already, this is for you, first-time home buyers: the government wants to help you buy a house.

In fact, according to The Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, it’s willing to give you a $7500 tax credit to sweeten the deal. This credit will be offered interest-free, to be paid back over 15 years.

Who qualifies?

New Home Buyers: To be considered a newbie, you can’t have owned a home within the last three years. For married taxpayers, neither spouse may have owned a primary residence in order for either to qualify.

How long will this last?

The house in question put be purchased between April 9, 2008 and July 1, 2009.

For more information, see article

If you’re from an average neighborhood in America, odds are that home values have gone down around you. But if you’re from Detroit, odds are you could buy a house for less than three tanks of gas.

Just when we thought the market couldn’t be worse, we look at Detroit, one of the poorest big cities in the nation. According to a recent article in The Detroit News, it’s not at all uncommon to see homes going for $100 or $300.

Yes, you read that right. I didn’t forget to add some zeros or a K sign. $100. For a house.

But a recent home sale in Detroit has shown just how bad the market really has gotten in certain areas of the country. It demonstrates this all-time low, if you will. The foreclosed home at 8111 Traverse Street was listed for $100 on the MLS and still took 19 days to sell.

In the end, the bank lost $10,000: $2.5K to a realtor, plus a $1K bonus; $500 in closing costs for the buyer; back taxes; and a water bill.

You hear a lot of people these days talking about real estate’s being a “buyers’ market.” And, if you’ve paid any attention at all to real estate, you can probably guess that this means something about the market working in favor of buyers.

Simply put, it all goes back to the economy.

In a prosperous economy, people are doing well, businesses are thriving, we’re all spending more on eating out and vacations and so on. This type of economy usually means people are buying houses, and if enough people want houses, the demand can get higher than the supply. This is a sellers’ market. In other words, sellers have much more negotiating power and tend to be getting their fair asking prices or higher.

Then there are times when the economy is struggling. Layoffs, budget cuts, higher costs of living push expenses up and make consumers trim spending. In this type of economy, people tend to save rather than spend, and they aren’t as likely to buy homes. If enough people decide not to buy, the supply of homes for sale can exceed the number of buyers. This is a buyers’ market. Because there are fewer buyers, they have a lot more negotiating power and tend to buy for less than a home’s fair asking price.

Then, for one reason or another, the economy slows down. Companies lay off employees and consumers are more careful about where they spend money, perhaps saving more than usual. As a result, the economy decelerates even further. If it slows enough, we have a recession.

During such a time, fewer people are buying homes. Even so, some homeowners find themselves in a situation where they must sell. Families grow beyond the capacity of the home, employees get relocated, and some may even find themselves unable to make their mortgage payment - perhaps because of a layoff in the family.

In the business cycle of real estate, there are buyers’ markets and sellers’ markets…and some markets in between.  It is all based on supply and/or demand.”

“The Help-U-Sell Real Estate franchise company entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings after a group of regional operators filed an involuntary petition for bankruptcy.”

Read the rest of this article here.

World-famous talk show sidekick, Star Search host and television icon Ed McMahon is fighting foreclosure on his multimillion dollar estate in Beverly Hills. His beautiful six-bedroom, five-bathroom home sits on a hilltop in the gated community of The Summit, which overlooks Mulholland Drive. According to real estate agent Alex Davis, it has been on the market for two years, listed at $6.25 million.

McMahon has not been able to work much in the past 18 months due to a neck injury he sustained in March, 2007. In late February of this year, McMahon fell $644,000 behind on payments to his $4.6 million loan.

On Thursday, August 14, multi-billionaire Donald Trump announced that he would purchase the home for an undisclosed amount of money and lease it to the struggling Ed McMahon. “The Donald” doesn’t even know McMahon. He is doing it out of the goodness of his heart. He said it “would be an honor.” The details are still being discussed, but a rep for McMahon said that he is very optimistic that everything will work out.