Blog.ByTheOwner.com

You’ll have to forgive that the title of this blog was “borrowed” from my favourite personal finance guru, Gail Vaz-Oxlade. Gail hosts the TV show “‘Till debt do us part“.

Gail’s blog has an enormous wealth of information (pun intended). However, I thought that her blog entitled “YOU Need To Be In Charge” contained a very valuable lesson to anyone selling or buying a home.

Gail points out that she watched a show called “Property Virgins” where “the host tell a couple that since the bank had pre-approved them for $350,000, that’s how much they should spend. She tried to convince her poor –sucker-clients that since the bank had run all their numbers, checked their credit history, calculated their debt-to-income ratio, it was the best judge of how much debt they could afford to take on. ”

Gail’s comments and suggestion that “YOU need to be in charge” is very similar to the message the ByTheOwner.com teaches. The first line of our Seller’s Guide quotes Epictetus: “Only the educated are free”.

We believe that selling a home, with or without an agent, involves education. Before you list a home, you need to know all the costs involved and you need to know how much money you will keep at the end of the process. You also need to know what services are being provided so that you can calculate if it’s a good decision.

Knowledge is power!

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Our customers often write great testimonials describing their selling experience. Reading what our customers thought about selling privately and about ByTheOwner.com, is a great way for our company, our current customers, and our future customers to learn and get great advice.

Often our testimonials will mention that our local rep and customer service was outstanding, real estate agents were a pain, and that selling privately was easier than the customer thought it would be. Oh yes, and most will mention the unbelievable amount of money they saved. Recently we have received a lot of testimonials from customers who are using the words “fast”, “weeks”, and “days” to describe their selling experience. Here are a few testimonials from the past two weeks that mention the speed of their sale:

There are many more customers who have sold just as fast. Click on the testimonials above to read more than 1000 testimonials from ByTheOwner.com customers.

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Here are the testimonials that we received from our Greater Toronto Area customers in May:

ByTheOwner.com was recently featured in the National Post and the Financial Post. The articles focuse on our owner, Nicolas Bouchard, and our growth since 1997.

The articles can be read by clicking on the link below:

National Post Article

Financial Post Article

In the past 3 months, ByTheOwner.com has been featured in:

The Toronto Star

The Halifax Daily Star

The Vancouver Province

The Montreal Gazette

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MLS is changing the rules in order to “protect their MLS trademark”. Here is a recent Real Estate Article from an Ottawa based writer for Canadian Business Magazine.

The author also posted some info on his blog about his own experiences selling For-Sale-By-Owner.

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

New listings increased 61% from 669 new listings in August 2006, to 1080 new listings in August 2007

Sold properties increased 39% from 361 sold properties in August 2006, to 502 sold properties in August 2007.

Total active listings increased 30% from 3,970 active homes for sale in August 2006, to 5189 active homes for sale in August 2007.

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

Website visitors increased from 463,560 unique visitors in August 2006, to 729,036 in August 2007. This is a 57% increase in unique website visitors from August 2006 to 2007.

Pageviews increased from 5.0 million page views in August 2006, to 6.5 million pageviews in August 2007. This is 30% increase in pageviews from August 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.

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ByTheOwner.com recently passed 15,000 sold properties!

Since we started in 1997, we have consistently sold more properties each year:

1998 - 35 Sold Properties
1999 - 105 Sold Properties
2000 - 220 Sold Properties
2001 - 614 Sold Properties
2002 - 1059 Sold Properties
2003 - 1528 Sold Properties
2004 - 2269 Sold Properties
2005 - 2544 Sold Properties
2006 - 3510 Sold Properties
2007 - 3202 Sold Properties (As of Aug. 15th, 2007!)

These results do not include the sold properties from our Canadian Partner FSBO websites. OKhomeseller.com has helped sell 1735 properties since 2002 and Saskhouses.com has helped 735 properties sell so far in 2007 and they helped 1057 properties sell in 2006!

These numbers show that For-Sale-By-Owner in Canada is growing in popularity. Thanks to everyone selling without an agent!

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Here are ByTheOwner.com’s housing and listing stats for July 2007:

New listings increased 35% from 717 new listing in July 2006, to 968 new listings in July 2007

Sold properties increased 45% from 302 sold properties in July 2006, to 439 sold properties in July 2007.

Total active listings increased 23% from 3,900 active homes for sale in July 2006, to 4828 active homes for sale in July 2007.

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

Website visitors increased from 339,286 unique visitors in July 2006, to 651,086 in July 2007. This is a 94% increase in unique website visitors from July 2006 to 2007.

Pageviews increased from 3.7 million page views in July 2006, to 5.8 million pageviews in July 2007. This is 54% increase in pageviews from July 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 July 2007 we had 651,086 unique visitors and they looked at 5.8 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 links on it, and one person goes to that page, it could be counted as 30 “hits”. This would mean that ByTheOwner.com received more than 173 million “hits” in July. 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