Ensure good web promo of your house

The web can be a great way to promote your house, but you need to make sure prospective buyers can see it and easily access it. Keep the following in mind to make sure your house listing gets ample hits on the web:

• If you’re using a real estate agent to sell your house: Be sure your agent has an Internet site through which you can list your house. Visit the site and see what you think of it. Are the properties for sale well presented? Is the site easy to use and visually appealing? Ask the agent whether her company’s website is an Internet Data Exchange (IDX) participant. This enables real estate brokers to share listings online, via syndication, among many real estate websites so your property gets maximum online exposure. In addition to publishing your listing on their company website, aggressive, tech-savvy agents will purchase a dedicated site for your listing (for example, www.123MainStreet.com). Please keep in mind, as we note in Chapter 7, that your selection of a good agent should be based on many important criteria, such as her experience and knowledge of the local real estate market and not simply her website.
• If you’re a FSBO seller: Should you be going the FSBO route to sell your house, you’re going to have to get your house online yourself. Some sample online options include

  • PowerSites’ Agency Logic (www.agencylogic.com): For just $50, you get your own domain name (for example, www.yourstreetaddress.com) and hosting for one year (for $199, they’ll build it for you). You can post dozens of photos, unlimited property descriptions, and links to useful information, such as neighborhood info, school info, and so on.

    Having a dedicated website address can also save you money on print ads that you place for your house in newspapers and magazines. You can run shorter ads and put your web address in the print ad for folks wanting more information. Agency Logic submits your website to all the major search engines.

  • ForSaleByOwner.com (forsalebyowner.com): This site proudly proclaims, “Say goodbye to 6% commissions. Reduce or eliminate listing commissions entirely,” and walks you through preparing your online house-for-sale advertisement. You get a one-month free listing and then pay $19.95 per month. Alternatively, you can sign on with one of its agents and agree to pay that agent 1.99 percent (and of course, if the buyer has agent representation, you’ll be on the hook to pay the buyer’s agent something too).
  • Other sites: Tap into the popular real estate listing websites www.craigslist.org, www.trulia.com, and www.zillow.com as well your local newspapers’ classified ads and websites.

To understand what FSBO ads can and can’t do for you, check out the next section for more info.

Knowing the truth about for-sale-by-owner (FSBO) sites

If you’re attempting to sell your house yourself, the Internet can be useful as a supplementary marketing tool. You can either create your own website or list your property through one of the online FSBO listing services. Although creating your own site allows you to go crazy and take full advantage of the web’s multimedia capabilities (you can post color photos of your property, include a floor plan, offer a video tour, and so forth), consider using a good FSBO listing service instead. Building your own site takes a great deal of time and money … and (sorry to say) you’ll probably get as much traffic as a small North Dakota town in January.

Most FSBO online sites charge FSBO sellers a modest fee to list houses for sale. Increasingly, sites like Owners.com (www.owners.com), for example, offer a free FSBO listing. You can list your house for sale along with unlimited photos and property descriptions, a customized yard sign with a toll-free answering service, and a video. Why do these sites offer their services for free? Because they know that many FSBOs won’t sell their houses and will then be in the market for an agent, and that’s where they can make their money.

The success rate for sellers using online listing sites is spotty. The owners.com site, for example, doesn’t report the actual success rate of its customers (it does provide some testimonials).

These types of websites have relatively few listings and — compared to the overall number of houses on the market — aren’t going to attract much traffic. Pat Low’s experience was typical among online FSBO listers we know. She listed her house on a FSBO site and had few online inquiries. “The more serious inquiries came through more traditional channels, such as newspaper ads, lawn signs, and open houses,” she said.

Before parting with any of your hard-earned money on a website, be clear about why you’re going online. Remember that the Internet is only one of many marketing tools and rarely gets a house sold (see Chapter 12 for effective marketing tools). Also remember that most FSBO websites get little traffic. Finally, recognize that by placing ads in larger local newspapers, you’ll probably be getting your ad online because most newspaper classifieds appear online now as well as in print.

Realize the limits of valuing your house online

Websites such as www.trulia.com and www.zillow.com offer “tools” that purportedly help you value your house online. Simply enter your street address, these sites say, and you’ll be told what your house is worth. Before you spend any money or submit any personal information, understand that these sites can only do so much for you and most of them aren’t worth your time or money.

In fact, the worst of these sites are frauds. They are nothing more than referral sources for real estate agents looking for new listings. After providing your address, phone number, and all sorts of other personal information, one such site sends you an email that says the following:

“Thank you for telling us about yourself and your real estate needs. You may soon get a phone call from a number you don’t recognize, if you fall within our service areas… . Because instant, online valuation can be off by as much as 10 to 20 percent (we’re talking tens of thousands of dollars here), we’ll put you in direct contact with one qualified local real estate professional who will give you the most accurate information you can get.”

This commentary is quite revealing in two respects. First, it demonstrates the true agenda for how these “free” online pseudo-valuation services make money — through referrals to real estate agents. Second, by their own admission, their accuracy isn’t good.

Whether you’re using a real estate agent or trying to sell your house on your own, don’t determine your house’s asking price this way! Such methods won’t work because

• Websites lack important property details. When you type your house’s address into valuation websites, most sites know little more about your property than what you paid for it (and sometimes not even that) and perhaps how many bedrooms and bathrooms it has. Most sites don’t know about the improvements you’ve made to the property, current square footage, yard size, and myriad other factors that affect your house’s value.
• Valuation methods generally are simplistic. Because website house valuation tools have so little data on your property, most sites superficially value your house. For example, knowing that you bought your house three years ago, many sites simply add a percentage increase that the average home in your larger metropolitan area has enjoyed during that time period. For the reasons cited in the preceding bullet, at best you’re getting only a general assessment of what your house may now be worth. Home values don’t all rise (or fall) by the same percentage in various towns and neighborhoods in a given metropolitan area. The price changes that websites use often are 6 to 12 months old, which in a rapidly changing real estate market can lead to large valuation differences. Also, within a metro area there may be neighborhoods that have increased say 5 percent over a given amount of time while others have decreased 5 percent.

We’re not saying that website house valuation tools are totally worthless. Some of these sites enable you to find out what various properties in your area are selling for — information that’s even more valuable if you’ve actually toured those houses. But please don’t use these sites to value your house.