FSBO Jane

There are so many real estate websites out there these days that even I can’t keep up with! I mainly stick to sites dealing with FSBO, but other agent/broker sites could really benefit FSBO buyers and sellers too! As an internet enthusiast, my advice is to search out sites that are continually being updated with new features. These sites clearly want to stick out from the bunch and to help you as much as possible! Here are the latest three upgraded sites that I noticed and think you should check out.

As per usual, Buy Owner.com deserves a shout out. Though their website has always been fantastically user-friendly and organized, they now have added a Google map feature. This feature allows you to search the surrounding area of a house that you’re interested in. You can find out what’s in walking distance, what shops/restaurants/parks are in the area, and anything else that interests you! You can also zoom in on the neighborhood and view exactly how it’s set up. If you have children, check out the local schools! The surrounding areas are as important as the home itself.

Read this Buy Owner blog for more information.

www.OpenHouse.com added a new feature for agents and brokers. As any sort of buyer, you’ll want to check this site out! A new fee-based feature listing allows agents to pay extra in order for their open houses to be listed first. This way, buyers can see who is desperately trying to sell their home. In turn, they may also be willing to make sacrifices in order to make their potential buyers happy! As a seller, see what time of day brings the most potential buyers, or find out when there’s downtime for you to host your open house!

www.Condo.com has added a new feature that shows past sale and rental date for the Florida area. If you’re buying or selling in Florida, check out the prices that condos have recently been sold or rented for! It may help you decide what price to list your own condo or home for, and what price to pay for an available condo or home.

Inspired by all the other blogs that do round-ups, I’m going to join the fun. Here’s a list of a few articles I’ve found interesting over the past week:

• Real Estate is Back!
• Remodeling Trend: Universal Design
• Saving Money to Buy a New Home

(Note: I took down the previous post about ForSalebyOwner.com, in light of a mistake in the original post and then just too much confusion over the whole thing. If you want any clarification, I’d recommend you check out this article.)

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!

Creative home builders aren’t giving up in today’s housing market; they’re getting creative. Take Pulte Homes, for example, one of the largest home builders in the nation. Trying to draw clients not just to their constructions but also to the market in general, Pulte is matching the government’s $7.5K tax incentive to first-time home buyers with another $7.5K discount of its own.

According to this recent Wall Street Journal article, “The tax credit applies to primary residences bought by individuals making up to $75,000 a year or married couples with combined income of up to $150,000 a year.”

You can’t have owned a home within the last three years, in order to qualify as a first-timer.

As newbie home buyers make up a large slice of their potential clients, Pulte is sweetening the deal, so to speak, in hopes of luring more to the table.

For more information about the tax credit, visit the Federal Housing’s Tax Credit Site.

To read the rest of the Wall Street Journal article, go here.