Blog.ByTheOwner.com

Open House Tips

An Open House is your time to shine as a private seller! It’s also your home’s time to shine and get sold! Here are some tips to make your open house go great…

Be Prepared: Your Home

You can spend the morning before an open house making sure your home is in perfect condition – clean, vacuum, remove the clutter, remove personal photographs, light come candles for a pleasant aroma (or bake some cookies), set the table, make the beds… The goal is to make your home look clean, open, and simple. Basically, try to make your home look like a brand new model home. This is your home’s time to shine!

Be Prepared: Your Information

Feature Sheets: Your buyers will most likely be looking at a few homes over the weekend. You want to make sure that they receive a feature sheet with your photos and info. After looking at 5-10 homes, some buyers might forget the special features of your home. You want them to have something tangible that they can take home and look at later. The ByTheOwner.com feature sheets will have a link to your listing so that the buyers can go online and see the photos and info again and again!

Legal Info: Along with the feature sheet, it is a good idea to have your lawyer’s information available for buyers. If they would like to submit an offer, they will need your lawyer’s information. You can attach your lawyer’s business card to the feature sheet and let the buyers know that they can bring you an offer and you will review it with your lawyer.

Your Knowledge: Buyers will look at 20-30 homes before they buy. They will most likely be knowledgeable about what is going on the neighbourhood. This is also your chance to show them that you know what’s going on. If you are prepared, you can discuss other properties in the neighbourhood. You can ask the buyers about other properties they have seen

www.ByTheOwner.com

Advantages to having an Open House

There are many advantages to having an open house including:

Managing Your Time: People who sell privately need to minimize the time spent on the sale of their home. Open houses can be a great way to do this. Not everyone has the time to keep their home clean all the time or to show their home on a Wednesday night when they are trying to put their children to bed. You can use Open Houses to manage your time by inviting all buyers to come to your open house on the weekend. You can spend the morning of your open house cleaning and preparing for your visitors and then devote 3-4 hours concentrating on showing your home and talking with buyers.

Weekends Are For Buyers: Just as you can be busy during the week, so are buyers. Most buyers will search online during the week and then spend the weekend visiting homes and open houses. Making your home available during the weekend is an important way to reach buyers.

Open House Signs: Signs are one of the most important factors to selling a home. Imagine a buyer going to see an open house around the corner from your home. If you do not have your open house signs up, there is a chance that they might miss your home. Open houses allow you to place temporary signs in your neighbourhood on the weekends when all the buyers are out shopping for their next home. What an excellent opportunity!

Creating a Buzz: Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd. One important factor of inviting all the buyers to come during a certain time frame, is that they will hopefully see other buyers interested in your home and this will show them that they will need to take action if they are interested, because it will soon be sold!

www.ByTheOwner.com

April is Open House month and lots of our customers are opening their door and bringing in all the buyers. This is also helping sell more homes! Here a few sold homes with open houses… along with their testimonials.

“PATIENCE is the keyword. Keep on waiting untill the right buyer comes in your home.. Don’t give up and always do your open house.. Thank you BYTHEOWNER.COM and KEEP IT UP…..”

“It’s been a great experience using ByTheOwner.com, selling privately is a lot simpler than people think, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. In the end it’s the lawyers that do the work, not the agents. Thanks for all your help Magda, best of luck to you all.“

“ByTheOwner.com was a great way to sell my home. Having an open house was very effective and it attracted a lot of interested buyers.“

“Professional, eye catching signage, Agents where not much of a problem, but rather entertaining in trying to get “us” to sign with them. The best one was the box of donuts left on the front steps. If selling again, I would definetly go this route. The buyer saved $ and we saved $, win/win, except for the over commissioned agents.“

“little bit of a house war..as offers came pouring….two solid offers @ 155!!!!had to choose one!!! and this after dropping it to 152…thanks “ByTheOwner.com” great user friendly site as well!!! hats off!!!! Luc & Joanne!!!“

ByTheOwner.com

It was a long hard winter: Record snow falls, economic crisis! Those days are all behind us and Spring Is Here! and Homes are Selling The birds are back, and so are the buyers, which makes it a perfect time for an OPEN HOUSE!

Open Houses are a great way for private buyers and private sellers to connect. Private Buyers spend the week looking at homes online and then spend their weekends going to see homes in the neighbourhood’s of their choice. Private Sellers are also able to use open houses to get their house it tip-top shape and invite all the buyers to come in at a convenient time.

ByTheOwner.com is inviting all our sellers and all our buyers to come together during OPEN HOUSE MONTH on ByTheOwner.com. You can check out some of the Open House success stories here:

More Open Houses and More Sold Homes

Our OPEN HOUSE promotion is also combined with the launching our new and improved OPEN HOUSE section of our website. Buyers are now able to choose their OPEN HOUSES, plan their itineary, and get instant driving directions to all the homes they want to see. Check it out:

www.bytheowner.com/openhouses

Here is a links to:

Open House Tips

and

Advantages of having an open house

ByTheOwner.com

A recent article explains that real estate agent’s commissions might end up costing consumers even more money. The article states that the Ontario Government is considering combining the GST and PST into one tax. Currently only the GST (5%) is charged on a real estate agent’s commission. A combined tax (they call it “Harmonized”) could be more than 13%. Here is the tax that a person using an agent has to pay right now:

Agent’s Commission = $15,000
GST paid by seller = $750
Total Agent Cost = $15,750

After the Tax “Harmonization”:

Agent’s Commission= $15,000
Taxes paid by seller = $1,950
Total Agent Cost = $16,950

AN EXTRA $1,200 to use an agent!

Here is a link to a Globe and Mail article about the possible new tax:

Ontario moves to soften blended-tax blow with consumer exemptions

There are many costs involved with selling a home and the more you pay, the more tax you pay. Save your money and sell privately!

ByTheOwner.com

According to the Canadian Real Estate Association, the total dollar value of mls properties sold in 2008 was $132 billion dollars.This was down from $160 billion dollars of real estate transactions in 2007.

At an average commission of 5%, this means that real estate agent commissions in Canada went from $8 billion dollars in 2007 to $6.6 billion dollars in 2008: A drop of 1.4 Billion.

Can you believe that Canadian’s paid approximately $6.6 billion dollars in real estate agents in one year? That’s enough to “bail out” a lot of people. Now is the time to save your money and sell privately!

ByTheOwner.com helped sell more than 6,000 properties in 2008. At an average price of $303,594, this means that we helped save more than $100 million dollars in commissions in 2008.

ByTheOwner.com

ByTheOwner.com has more than 1000 testimonials available to read on our website. These are testimonials provided by our customers after they sell their home.

We recently examined these testimonials more closely and counted the frequency of the most common words. It was a great exercise for us, and it revealed the important aspects of our service. It also revealed what was important to our customers when they sold their home with ByTheOwner.com.

Here are the most common words from 1,000 ByTheOwner.com testimonials and how many times the word was mentioned:

“Great” - 400
“Agent” - 332
“Recommend” - 256
“Save” - 255
“Service” - 169
“Open House” - 154
“Easy” - 151
“Days” - 142
“Money” - 138
“Weeks” - 124
“Fast/Quick” - 109
“Happy” - 104
“Signs” - 99
“Photos/Pictures” - 95
“Patient/Patience” - 87
“Excellent” - 78

…and just for fun there was 1 “Woohoo!” mentioned in our testimonials.

Some of the lessons that we can learn from our testimonials include:

- Our customers appreciate our great service and they would recommend us to their friends.
- Real estate agents are usually annoying and bothersome to our customers.
- Our customers enjoying saving their money.
- Selling privately can be fast, quick, and easy.
- Our customers can sell in days and weeks.
- Some of the keys to sell include open houses, patience, signs and great HRD photos.

Thanks to all our customers who sent us their testimonials. Everyone can learn from your words of experience!

ByTheOwner.com

Rob Carrick, the personal finance columnist from the Globe and Mail, does some great interviews on personal finance. You can see them at:

The Globe and Mail (Your Money)

His lastest video post is about the current state of mortgage rates and what might be ahead. Check it out at :

The Globe and Mail (The recession and the real estate market)

Rob also wrote about selling privately back in 2005. You can check out that article at:

Selling your own home? The logistics are easier than ever

ByTheOwner.com

ByTheOwner.com recently passed 25,000 homes sold. Since we started operations in 1997, we have increased our sold listings every year.

In 2008 ByTheOwner.com sold more than 2% of all the homes sold in Canada. Congratulations to all our sold homes! 25,000 sold properties represents more than 300 millions dollars saved in commissions!

ByTheOwner.com

Here are a few recent articles mentioning how 1st time home buyers are driving the market.

Kitchener
Toronto
Vancouver

it is a great opportunity for 1st time home buyers because mortgage rates are at all time lows and house prices are down.

ByTheOwner.com