Blog.ByTheOwner.com

ByTheOwner.com recently received a page ranking of 5 from Google. Page Ranking partly determines the results of google’s search results. Typically sites with a page ranking (PR) of 5 or more will be at the top of related searched. Google does not disclose the science behind page ranking, but typically well designed websites with lots of useful information and incoming natural links are ranked better than poorly designed websites with few incoming links.

ByTheOwner.com works hard on our website design and online marketing to ensure that we rank at the top of google searches. We have also noticed that google searches vary based on the geographic placement of where the search is coming from. For example a person searching “for sale by owner” in Toronto might receive different results from a person performing the same search in Vancouver. For this reason we are working at improving our results throughout Canada.

www.bytheowner.com

A recent Comscore Media Metrix for September 2007 ranked ByTheOwner.com/Duproprio.com as the 6th most visited real estate advertising website in Canada. Here are the results:

1. MLS.ca (www.mls.ca)
2. Remax International (www.remax.ca)
3. Royallepage (www.royallepage.ca)
4. La Capital (www.lacapitalvendu.com)
5. Canoe (www.micasa.canoe.com)
6. ByTheOwner.com/Duproprio.com (www.bytheowner.com)

ByTheOwner.com is proud to be amoung the top real estate websites in Canada. It’s important to note that ByTheOwner.com was the only For-Sale-By-Owner website in the top 10. The closest FSBO website ranked #17. ByTheOwner.com is looking to take more market share away from traditional real estate agents such as Remax and Royal Lepage. The cost to sell a home with a real estate agent is approximately 5% of your home’s value ($15,000 + GST on a $300,000 home).

www.ByTheOwner.com

Toronto has just passed a new land transfer tax for new home purchases. This new land transfer tax is in addition to the current Ontario land transfer tax that everyone is required to pay. Anyone who has purchased a home has needed to pay the Ontario land transfer tax. In Ontario the tax rates are (for example on a $450,000 home):

$0 - $55,000 = .005% = $275
$55,000 - $250,000 = .01% = $1,950
$250,000 - $400,000 = .015% = $2,250
$400,000 + = .02% = $1,000

Total Ontario land transfer tax = $5,475

However, now in Toronto, all new home buyers need to pay the above Ontario tax, plus an additional Toronto Land Transfer Tax. Here is the Toronto tax on a $450,000 home:

$0 - $55,000 = .005% = $275
$55,000 - $400,000 = .01% = $1,950
$400,000 + = .02% = $1,000

Total Toronto land transfer tax = $4,725

This Toronto Tax is in ADDITION to the Ontario Tax, so now a buyer in Toronto is required to pay $5,475 + $4,725 = $10,200 in tax!

WOW!

An important note is that first time buyers do not pay the Toronto Tax on the first $400,000. This seems to indicate that Toronto is looking to tax people who are buying their second home (ie. moving up or downsizing). It looks like Toronto is trying to get their hands on the increase in value that has come over the last 7 years.

Imagine this scenario: You bought a house in 2002 for $300,000 and you want to upgrade to a bigger house. Your home is now worth $400,000. If you sell it with an agent you pay $20,000 + GST and legal fees, so you only keep approximately $375,000. Now you have to buy a bigger home, but those bigger homes also cost more. So you need to buy a $500,000 home. The land transfer tax on that new home is $12,200. So plus legal fees, it costs you $515,000 for the new home. In the course of buying and selling a new home ,you have paid more than $35,000 in fees that you will never get back! If you sell that new home with an agent and you pay another commission, you now have to sell it for $575,000 to even break even!

SOLUTION: With everyone else trying to get your money, the only solution is to look after yourself, take charge and sell your own home. In the above scenario, you will save $22,000 selling your $400,000 home with ByTheOwner.com. You can now use that money to pay the land transfer tax, and keep $10,000 for yourself! Then when you sell your next home for $575,000 you will save another $30,000 is commission and GST. So using ByTheOwner.com now saved you more than $50,000. Imagine what you could do with $50,000?

ByTheOwner.com

I just returned home from a few weeks in Europe. I had a great time! What interested me was the commission rates for real estate agents in England and Ireland. A relative of mine is a real estate agent in Ireland. He has been an agent for more than 25 years. I was shocked when I asked him what commission percent he received. He said “One percent! And usually less than 1% for homes over $500,000″. Wow! 1 percent! My next question was “well what do you do for the buyer?”. He said he visits the home, takes photos, prices the home, handles all offers, visits and calls, puts up the lawn sign and directional signs… Sounds exactly the same as real estate agents in Canada except the commission is 1% instead of 5%.

What about the re/max office down the street in Ireland? Do they charge 1%? “Of course they do!”. He said when he started the commission rates were 3%, but they came down due to competition and the rise the price of homes.

Our conversation continued as he asked me “why would anyone pay 5%?” After thinking about it, all I could say was “I don’t know. They just pay 5%”. He asked me “why don’t people just go to an agent that offers less %? Isn’t it an open competition system?”. I remembered that the CREA instilled tougher rules to “protect their trademark”

It really makes you think. Unfortunately, this is poor news for consumers in Canada, but good news for ByTheOwner.com. Because real estate agents ask unfair commission rates in Canada, ByTheOwner.com is growing extremely quickly. This year we have increased our SOLD properties by 35% and we are now 1% of all the home sales in Canada.

William Stynes
Sales Manager
ByTheOwner.com

Here are ByTheOwner.com’s Canadian For Sale By Owner stats for September 2007:

New listings increased 92% from 551 new listings in September 2006, to 1059 new listings in September 2007

Sold properties increased 31% from 372 sold properties in September 2006, to 478 sold properties in September 2007.

Total active listings increased 42% from 3,985 active homes for sale in September 2006, to 5689 active homes for sale in September 2007.

www.bytheowner.com

ByTheOwner.com’s website statistics for the month of September 2007:

Website visitors increased from 406,719 unique visitors in September 2006, to 645,134 in September 2007. This is a 58% increase in unique website visitors from September 2006 to 2007.

Pageviews increased from 4.1 million page views in September 2006, to 5.8 million pageviews in September 2007. This is 40% increase in pageviews from September 2006 to 2007.

Unique visitors and pageviews are the two most useful statistics when it comes to measuring the exposure you will receive from a For Sale By Owner website. Unique visitors is the number of individual people coming to look for properties on the site. Pageviews is the number of pages that those visitors look at. On ByTheOwner.com in August 2007 we had 729,036 unique visitors and they looked at 6.5 million pages. This means each visitor looked at approximately 9 pages.

Some websites claim to have a certain number of “hits”. This is not a valid measure of website activity, because a “hit” can be counted a number of different ways. For example, if a page has 30 images on it, and one person goes to that page, it could be counted as 30 “hits”. This would be like saying ByTheOwner.com received more than 173 million “hits” in August. ByTheOwner.com does not quote how many “hits” we receive because it is not a valid stat. Unique visitors and pageviews are the only real measure of website activity.

www.bytheowner.com

I want to share a recent Home Staging transformation I was involved in.

A family with two young children decided to sell their house in order to purchase a larger home. The husband is a real estate agent and wanted to Stage the house, but his wife was resistant to the idea at first. So, he decided to get an external opinion and called me in for a consultation.

(more…)

According to the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA). seasonally adjusted sales dropped 4.1 per cent in August to 43,257 units from July’s 45,102. Resale housing sales activity was down in most provinces, particularly in Ontario and Quebec. But the real estate association says sales in August were up 7.7 per cent over sales in the same month of 2006.

Meanwhile, on ByTheOwner.com, 361 houses were sold in August 2006 and 502 in August 2007 : an increase of 40% over last year. Those 502 sold houses represented about 1% of the overall housing market in Canada.

The median length of time that single family homes were on the market on ByTheOwner.com was 52 days in Canada and an average of 67.81% of our single family houses for sale in Canada sold using our services.