Blog.ByTheOwner.com

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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ByTheOwner.com is proud to announce that we have been listed at #90 on Canadian Business Magazine’s Top 100 Fastest Growing Companies!

Canadian Business is Canada’s top magazine for news, opinion and community for business leaders, entrepreneurs and investors. Each year they release a list of the fastest growing Canadian companies over the past 5 years. This is ByTheOwner.com’s first time on the list and it is an honor for us to be ranked among other great Canadian companies such as Research in Motion, WestJet, Workbrain Corp., Garda World Security, etc..

The top 100 list is ranked by calculating a company’s revenues in 2001 and in 2006 and then comparing the rate of growth. ByTheOwner.com had revenues of $306,555 in 2001 and revenues of $2,317,320 in 2006, for a growth rate of 656%. This ranks us as the 90th fastest growing company in Canada. ByTheOwner.com’s employees grew from 5 employees in 2001 to 46 employees in 2006.

It is important to note that this list calculated growth in terms of revenues and not profits. Since we started operations in 1997, ByTheOwner.com has invested all profits back into our business in order to expand our service, and increase the visibility and functionality of our website. During the 5 years, from 2001 to 2006, ByTheOwner.com helped more than 11,500 owners sell privately, resulting in more than $100,000,000 dollars saved in real estate commissions!

A big “Thank-you” to all our customers over the past 5 years. We look forward to helping many more owners sell privately and save!

More info about ByTheOwner.com in the Canada’s Top 100, can be read at Yahoo Finance (Click Here)

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ByTheOwner.com set a new record today! We just had a $1,400,000 Lot in Muskoka sell privately in less than 1 month! This is the most expensive property that we have ever had sell on our website! And of course this sets a new record for the most commissions saved!

Real Estate commissions in Muskoka vary, so lets look at how much this ByTheOwner.com customer saved at the different commission rates:

At 7% commission - $98,000 Saved!

At 6% commission - $84,000 Saved!

At 5% commission - $70,000 Saved!

Can you imagine how many years you would have to work to save that amount of money?

Can you imagine what you could buy with that amount of money?

Could you imagine if you had paid that amount of money to a real estate agent?

Contratulations on selling privately and saving a lot of money!

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ByTheOwner.com / DuProprio.com is seeing a slight change in our customer base. When we first started out in Quebec city in 1997, we were mainly a new advertising form for people who were already selling privately. Owners who were accustom to using newspapers and small signs to sell their home privately, realized that posting photos online and using professional signs made a huge difference in increasing the number of potential buyers, reducing unnecessary calls, and making it easier to sell.

As we continue to grow, we are seeing more and more owners who would not have necessarily considered selling privately, until they saw our signs and visited our website. Our testimonials show that more often than before, our clients are people who are selling privately for the first time. For many of our recent clients, it was the first time they sold privately and we see words like “Surprised”, “Amazed” in our testimonials.

“I was very surprised with how very little work it was”

“The interest in our property was beyond our expectations”

“As a first time seller, this has been a great 1st experience for us.”

“This is the first time I tried to sell my home privately. Not only was it easier than I thought it would be, but I also sold in just over 2 weeks.”

Another comment we are seeing is that once people sell privately, they will not use an agent again…

“This is the second sale of our house through the service. My family now saved over 50K in agency fees over the past year.”

“We would do this again in a flash”

“Definitely would use this service again”

“This is the third home I have sold using ByTheOwner”

“We would definitely use this method again!!!!”

“I will never sell with a realtor ever again”

Unfortunately, a comment that we often see in our testimonials is that our clients had to deal with the constant calls from real estate agents.

“No matter what real estate agents tell you, don’t lose your faith “

“As expected we heard from many agents that were nay sayers, telling us we would not be able to sell our house on our own.”

“It is really sad that every realestate agent (or at least MOST) will call you and reassure that YOU are INCAPABLE of selling privately.”

“Don’t be discouraged by agents telling you your doing the wrong thing by selling by owner”

“The agents will tell you homes do not sell ByTheOwner but I have successfully sold twice now using their service.”

“We had numerous, and I mean numerous realtors approach us and offer to sell our house for between 220 000$ to 240 000$. One thing you must realize is that many realtors will quote you an unreasonably high sale price as a means of “buying” your listing, only to have your house sit on the market while others sell.”

“…most importantly do not to get distracted by realtors. We will never go with Real Estate Representation ever again “

We find our testimonials to be a great source of information for our clients. Many people describe the process and provide tips and advice. If you would like more information on how to sell your home privately, you can download our guide to selling your home privately.

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CityNews talked about ByTheOwner.com in August 2006. Click here to see the video »

Also, ByTheOwner.com has been featured on A-Channel news in London, Dec. 2006. Click to start the video.

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ByTheOwner.com recent had another property sell in one day. That makes a total of 131 properties that have sold in less than 24 hours on our site (we have another 69 properties that sold in 2 days!). It just goes to show that you never know who is ready to purchase your home, or who is looking to buy in your neighbourhood.
Our lastest 1 day sale in Guelph sold for $174,000. Had he gone with an agent, he would have paid more than $9,000 in real estate fees (5% + GST). Imagine paying that for 1 day of work!!!

Congratulations on saving $9,000 in one day!

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Since the launch of ByTheOwner.com’s New Homes website in March 2007 (newhomes.bytheowner.com), Ontario new home builders have taken advantage of this great new marketing tool! Many new home builders in Ontario, such as Valleyrauss Homes, Freure Homes, Mason Homes, Sunlight Heritage Homes, Sun Point Homes, Chris & Sons Builder’s Lmt, Fabbian Fine Homes, Stonecroft Homes, Townwood Homes, Tavon Homes, Bromberg Homes, Verdone Homes (2000), Hedburn Homes, Applewood Homes, Gregor Homes, and Sunfield Homes, have all marketed thier new and upcoming projects on ByTheOwner.com. Some new home listings have sold in less than 20 days!!!

These builders are taking advantage of the opportunity to showcase their new homes and projects to ByTheOwner.com’s 150,000 unique visitors per week. Each builder receives their own listing, their logo in each listing and a special builder’s page which describes more about the builder and allows visitors to access the builder’s specific website.

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ByTheOwner.com is launching a Billboard Advertising Campaign from Jan 15th - March 31st.

ByTheOwner.com has purchased more than 200 billboards in various cities across Canada(Montreal, Barrie, Quebec City, Kitchener-Waterloo, Vancouver Island…) in order to promote our website, our listings, and private sales. The billboard campaign will start Jan 15th and it will continue until March 31st. The goal of the campaign is to further increase our company’s website visitors so that more Canadians will buy and sell their home privately and save thousands in real estate commissions. In 2006, ByTheOwner.com averaged 100,000 unique visitors per week. During the first three weeks of 2007, we received an average of 145,000 unique visitors per week to our website. ByTheOwner.com increased our sold homes by 30% in 2006 and we forecast selling more than 5000 homes in 2007.