Blog.ByTheOwner.com

ByTheOwner.com reached 3000 sales in Ontario! This is a great accomplishment. You can see our growth below. Every year has been better than the last. Our average house for sale price in Ontario is approximately $310,000, which means that the average home sold on our site saves more than $16,000 in commissions and GST. (assuming 5% commission plus GST). Our 3,000 results in approximately $48 million dollars in commissions saved in Ontario.

2004 - 669 For Sale By Owner Homes SOLD

2005 - 766 For Sale By Owner Homes SOLD

2006 - 975 For Sale By Owner Homes SOLD

2007 - 517 For Sale By Owner Homes SOLD (on pace to sell 1100 homes in Ontario in 2007)

Since the launch of our new website platform in 2005, we have more than 800 testimonials from our customers

Thanks to all our customers for helping us reach this milestone!

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It looks like the Barrie Real Estate board is trying to use billboard advertising to promote their services…or perhaps they are cross training to become doctors?

Our Barrie rep, John Babic, thought this was quite funny so he took this photo for our blog.

What do you think about this photo?

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This is the link to the article that accompanied the Profit 100 Fastest Growing Companies.

Here is the section about ByTheOwner.com…

“…Another success story, Charny, Que.-based DuProprio.com/ByTheOwner.com (No. 90), offers a different lesson in responding to opportunity: decide fast, then get on with it. The for-sale-by-owner real estate website, with five-year revenue growth of 656%, to $2.3 million in 2006, says it is No. 1 in Canada in its market segment for traffic and sales. Yet Nicolas Bouchard, the firm’s CEO, says his family didn’t even craft a business plan when the firm saw the opportunity in 1997: “We did no research on the market—none at all.” Even last year, when it considered expanding beyond its flourishing Quebec and Ontario base into B.C., it didn’t conduct a thorough analysis. Instead, Bouchard met with his brother and sister over a family dinner, at which they decided to plunge in.

Yet the conclusion here isn’t just that you should move fast before someone else does. You also need to have the right stuff. DuProprio.com’s daring was rooted in a deep knowledge of the real estate industry. Although Bouchard was just 21 when the firm launched, he and his siblings had grown up in the business (their father was a long-time agent), and he had started buying houses when he was 15. Like most fast-growth companies, DuProprio.com succeeded not by inventing something new but by refining an existing offering. Bouchard knew that for-sale-by-owner websites were taking off stateside, so he didn’t see the need for hard proof that they could succeed in Canada.

By the time of the family dinner, DuProprio.com had nine years under its belt of learning by doing what worked on the Web, plus a crack in-house team of graphic designers and programmers delivering continuous improvements to its site. Unlike in Alberta, where DuProprio.com figured it was too late to overtake the two established players, the B.C. market was still up for grabs. So, right after the dinner, Bouchard and his sister Mary, the Quebec sales manager, flew to B.C. to spend a month knocking on the doors of people running for-sale-by-owner ads in newspapers or online classifieds. Their pitch was compelling: for about $400 you could list on a site whose polished, user-friendly design drew 150,000 unique visitors per week. You could tap into a network of services such as real estate law, appraisals and inspections. And you could test it for a limited time for free—but only if you signed up today. Thanks to this energetic sales push and a partnership with a local for-sale-by-owner service, DuProprio.com is closing in fast on becoming No. 1 in B.C….”

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ByTheOwner.com’s properties for sale can now take advantage of the 30 Million Facebook users!

On June 14th, ByTheOwner.com released our exclusive Facebook application. The application was built by our programmers and it allows our properties (Front photo and info) to be uploaded to Facebook.

Facebook is on it’s way to becoming the most visited website in the world. Currently there are 30 million users and there will be 50 million by the end of 2007. Here are the number of Facebook users in specific Canadian cities as of June 13th:

Toronto, ON - 641,221 (about 15% of the population)
Vancouver, BC - 281,030 (about 10% of the population)
Barrie, ON - 50,515 (about 40% of the population)
Kitchener, ON- 77,369 (about 20% of the population)
London, ON - 90,734 (about 25% of the population)
Ottawa, ON - 147,212
Hamilton, ON - 68,054
Kingston, ON - 35,285
Montreal, QC - 129,216

The ByTheOwner.com Facebook Application can be activated by clicking on the Facebook button in any listing.

After the listing has been uploaded, you can share the listing with your friends (and their friends) and you can place the home in the Facebook Marketplace and advertise it to everyone in your city.

Thanks to our ByTheOwner.com programmers who have worked very hard to get this up and running so quickly!

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The Globe and Mail reported today that interest rates in Canada have been on the rise lately. This can have an effect on the real estate market: 

“On a $300,000 mortgage with an amortization period of 25 years, a home buyer with a 4.99-per-cent mortgage would make monthly payments of $1,743.11, according to RBC’s online mortgage calculator. This would add up to a total interest cost of $222,932 over the life of the mortgage.

At a rate of 6.04 per cent, the monthly payments would increase by $183.45 to $1,926.56. The total interest cost rises by $55,035 to $277,967.”

In this example provided in the article, the higher interest rates results in a higher monthly payment for the buyers. If the highest monthly payment a buyer could receive was $1,743.11 for a $300,000 home, then this means that the buyer can no longer afford a $300,000 home because it now cost $1926.56.

A raise in interest rates means that buyers can afford less than they could at the lower rates and this will affect the housing market and house prices.

For more information on the Globe and Mail article, please click here.

What a great day for FSBO! On June 7th, 2007, Northwestern University released an independent, unbiased report (linked here) concluding that “MLS offers no advantage in the sale price ”

At ByTheOwner.com, we have often heard agents claim that they will get you “more money” and that their commission is “worth it” because they can “put your home on mls”. We always knew these claims to be false, but now there is proof!

The study took data from 1998-2004, and compared FSBOmadison.com (Madison, Wisconsin) to MLS. Many different factors (house characteristics, seller selection…) were considered and it is an incredibly detailed and thorough report. Some points from the study:

-”The average sale price of homes that sell on FSBO is higher that the average price of homes that sell with a realtor.”

-”We did not find that listing on the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) helps sellers obtain a significantly higher sales price.”

-”Our results suggest the two platforms (mls, fsbo) command similar prices.”

-”Internet sites facilitate direct (by owner) marketing. Direct marketing has always been possible using newspapers, flyers and other forms of advertising. However, the internet is a cheaper and potentially more effective form of direct marketing.”

-”a proportion (about 20%) of FSBO listings move to MLS after initial failure” - This statistic is particularly interesting because CREA publishes that “most people who try to sell their home on their own end up using a realtor in the end anyway“ . CREA considers 20% to be “most people”?

Some results were positive for agents. The report points out:

-”Listing on MLS does shorten the time it takes to sell a house.”

-”Realtors can save sellers time and generally help through a stressful and maybe difficult period.”

This report validates that listing your home on MLS does not mean that you will receive a higher price. If you are looking to get the most money out of selling your home, then selling your home privately is the best way to go.

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Today ByTheOwner.com’s online properties for sale reached 4,000 . This is the 1st time that the company has passed this plateau. This is excellent news for both sellers and buyers because: more homes online results in greater selection for buyers, and more homes online means more buyers for our sellers. It’s a great cycle!

ByTheOwner.com looks carefully at our volume because it is so important for both buyers and sellers. We know that buyers will return to our website each day if we have lots of new homes for sale. We currently average 1000 new properties per month. It is actually becoming harder to maintain a high inventory level because our sales have increased.

When homes are sold they appear as “just sold” for 2 weeks and then they move into our sold database. We recently added the “just sold” feature because buyers were calling us to ask “What happened to that home for sale?”. Now buyers can see if a home they were looking at “just sold”. Our sold database can be seen by all our website visitors. Anyone searching in a particular province, region, or city, is able to see all our 1) Properties for sale, 2) New properties, and 3) Sold properties.

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So, you decided to invest a few hundred dollars to prepare your house for sale. But how much should you budget ? How much home staging is enough ? And what are the top priorities ?

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The housing market in Canada is setting a record pace this year. Both ByTheOwner.com sales and mls.ca sales have increased in 2007.

It was reported that mls.ca sales increased 1.5% in April 2007. Year-to-date sales of homes by agents have increased 6.7% so far this year.

ByTheOwner.com’s sales have also increased. April’s sales grew by 52% from 314 private sales in 2006 to 482 private sales in 2007. Year-to-date, ByTheOwner.com’s sales have increase 42% from 1544 private sales in 2006 to 2196 private sales in 2007.

Both ByTheOwner.com and mls.ca are on pace to break home sales records in 2007. Mls.ca is forecast to pass 500,000 sales in Canada and ByTheOwner.com is forecast to pass 5,000 sales. It is important to note that ByTheOwner.com’s full service is available only in Ontario, Quebec, and BC. This means that ByTheOwner.com accounts for more than 1% of all sales in those provinces.

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HGTV has great tips on how to get ready to sell your home and how to stage your home.

Their Designed to Sell program is all about staging your home and making appeal to buyers so that you can make the best impact and get the most money for your home. There is no doubt that having a clean, uncluttered, and fresh smelling home makes an enormace difference in helping you sell. At ByTheOwner.com we list more than 200 homes per week, and we can see the difference it makes. If a home is well prepared when we come to take the photos, and the owner is ready for showings, it is more than likely that the home will sell in 2-6 weeks. Of couse the home also needs to be priced according to similar properties in the area, but the fact is that if your home looks great, then buyers will choose your home over the unprepared house down the street. If your home IS unprepared, you can expect buyer to bring in lower offers or not even bother to out in an offer at all.

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