Blog.ByTheOwner.com

ByTheOwner continues to grow! The most recent achievement is 7,000 active listings for sale in Canada. This is very impressive considering that we passed 6,000 properties for sale on April 15th of this year. This is a great indicator of our popularity. We currently advertise between 250-350 new homes per week.

Our ByTheOwner SOLD homes are also growing! We recently passed 4,000 properties sold in 2008, and our sold properties have increased 30% over 2007. On the contrary, MLS sold properties decreased 13.1% in the first half of 2008.

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ByTheOwner.com’s website statistics for the month of July 2008:

Website visitors increased from 651,086 visits in July 2007, to 885,876 in July 2008. This is a 36% increase in website visits from July 2007 to July 2008.

Pageviews increased from 5.7 million page views in July 2007, to 7.1 million pageviews in July 2008. This is 33% increase in pageviews from July 2007 to 2008.

Unique visitors increased from 361,379 unique visitors in July 2007, to 481,434 unique visitors in July 2008. This is 23% increase in unique visitors from July 2007 to 2008.

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.

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 200 million “hits” in a week. 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.

Stats provided by Google Analytics

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The Globe and Mail published an article suggesting that the real estate market in Alberta, Saskatchewan and BC could be 10% overpriced. To read the entire article please click here:

http://www.globeinvestor.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080808.wrealestate08/GIStory/

Here is a link to an article from the Toronto Star about the July real estate agent results. According to the article, real estate agent sales are down 12% in July and listings are up 28%. The average price for a home was $371,427 which is “the lowest year over year increase since the first quarter of 2001″.

http://www.thestar.com/article/473583

If home prices have only increased 1% from July 2007, that means that anyone who purchased a home in the last year and needs to sell it would lose money if they went with an agent! If we look at a $400,000 example:

SELLING WITH AN AGENT

2007 Home purchase price =$400,000
1% Home Price increase = $4,000
2008 Selling price = $404,000
Land Transfer Tax = $4,475
Real Estate Commission (5% +GST) = $21,210
OWNER KEEPS = $378,315
OWNER LOSES = $21,685 (OUCH!)

SELLING WITH ByTheOwner.com

2007 Home purchase price =$400,000
1% Home Price increase = $4,000
2008 Selling price = $404,000
Land Transfer Tax = $4,475
Real Estate Commission (5% +GST) = $0
ByTheOwner Fees = $649 (max)
OWNER KEEPS = $398,876
OWNER LOSES = $1,124 (Much better than losing $21,685!)

In this example, the owner saved more than $20,561 from the sale of their home by using ByTheOwner.com!

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