We've rented our home as of May 1st and have deactivated our listings until further notice

Check back next April to see if we re-list our house for sale!

Another Week, another dollar (or two) and Terabitz

I've been busy as hell this week trying to get everything ready for the closing on our new house, and I think we're all set, just waiting for a few callbacks from mortgage and title companies. The Homepage ForSaleByOwner.com listing has been up for a week now and it has generated 170 views from their homepage off of 5692 impressions, a CTR of 2.98%. This number continues to drop, but if a large percentage of the site's traffic is repeat visitors, I don't think that this would be out of the ordinary, after all how many repeat visitors are going to click to look on our listing more than once? I think that my theory about high volume low yield is starting to evidence itself in the results I have seen so far. This week there have been more calls from realtors and a few buyers, but no new appointments have been setup. I even received an email from a supposedly interested party in the UK, but something didn't feel quite right about it and I suspect that it is the beginning of a money order/transfer scam. Once this featured homepage listing is over with I don't think I will be renewing, instead I will sign up for a featured local listing and see if the lower volume, more targeted leads/clicks are a better investment.

Aside from the results on FSBO, my neighbor who is renting expressed some interest in our house, so I'm hoping that something materializes from that. In the grand scheme of it all, I totally forgot about WOM (Word-of-Mouth) advertising, and that may end up being my most effective medium of all. I would definitely be happy if anything comes of it, but also wonder if it makes all the online work I have done on this project so far a waste? Only one way to find out - wait and see if we have a buyer!

Last bit (pun intended) I will share with you for today is on a new site I discovered, Terabitz. Now at first I thought it was a useful tool for buyers to setup customized searches on a local area, but it turns out that it is a really interesting tool for realtors as well. The first screenshot I'm attaching shows how you can customize your search to display info on a local area around an address you might be looking at (Maps, local news, weather, businessese, schools hospitals, etc):



And if you click on one of the for sale listings, it actually brings you to a local Terabitz for sale listing posted by a realtor for one of their clients:

Overall it is an interesting Web 2.0-esque Real Estate site, and I am attempting to get my listing published there as well. Their tech guys have gotten back to me already, so I'm wondering how much is involved to post and if they will actually accomodate my listing once they find out I'm a FSBO. More updates to follow until I sell this house, have a great weekend!

Weekend Update

I have received more calls over this past weekend but still no more appointments have been scheduled for walk-throughs. So far on the ForSaleByOwner.com homepage listing I have seen my homepage impressions skyrocket up to 2776 views since launch, but my CTR has decreased to 3.24% (90 views). Overall since my listing launched I have had a total of almost 400 views to my listing, but not a whole heckuvalot of in-person foot traffic. I realize that this is not a simple PayPer Click campaign where I am trying to sell a $20 retail item, but I wonder what that magic number is that will help me convert a browsing consumer into a paying customer.

Aside from the FSBO listing, I have also seen the flat-fee MLS listing blossom onto other local realtor websites like Balistreri and Illustrated Properties, they both seem to have a fairly large footprint locally, so I think this should generate additional prospective homebuyer traffic for me. I stumbled upon this when I found another Realtor listing aggregator site by the name of Vast. Not only did it find my listing on ForSaleByOwner.com, but it also came up with the listings on both Balistreri and Illustrated Properties. I am very interested to see how these listings grow in distribution, and will keep tabs on where it appears through these different aggregators.

Also, I heard back from Trulia via email over the weekend, and they told me that they had no product for FSBO submissions, but are evaluating it for the future. It kinda sounded like the big blowoff but I am hoping that they may start to get more interested FSBO'ers sending them inquiries once my blog gets a little more distribution. Until then I will keep searching for other sites that can provide me with a free listing to gain more exposure.

On Homepage of ForSaleByOwner.com

Ok, so I finally caved and decided to fasttrack the promotional efforts for http://www.borgatahouse4sale.com/. I signed up for the $99 homepage promotion on ForSaleByOwner.com. Up until this point our listing had just over 200 views, and I felt like we could use a little more juice to get additional eyeballs on it. So for the next 14 days, our house will be up there with countless others all for the great price of $99. It seems like the listing went live late this morning, and had received 136 homepage views, and 12 listing views, so I calculate the CTR to be 8.82%. Pretty respectable for a web ad, but I really don't know how it compares to my national homes that are being rotated through that same inventory. Either way I think that it will be a worthwhile investment for the first 14 days, and then I might try the featured local listing to see what kind of traction that gets me. Honestly I think this first listing is going to be higher volume because of the national exposure, but lower yield. Conversely, if I sign up for the local spotlight, the $49 will be much lower volume, but definitely more qualified traffic. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out, but I always like to see my media buying theories played out in real life. Here's the actual view of how it looks on the home page, I'm pretty happy with it so far:

Showing #1 & Realtor.com

So things seemed to go pretty well with the first showing. There was an actual realtor that showed up with their client (a HOMEBUYER), so I guess the story that there are no buyers out there isn't exactly true. I felt like the buyer was really just shopping around and they didn't seemed to be wowed by our house, but maybe I am just reading into it too much. We did the basic here is our house walk-through and made sure to mention all of the upgraded features and do a little demo on everything we have added on in the past year or so. Hopefully they like it and will call back for more info, but if nothing else it was good practice and we needed a fire-drill like this to get the house up to showing condition.

Also, I found out that our MLS listing did finally show up on Realtor.com, I hadn't been able to find it recently because their sort by price functionality does not work that great. I believe they do that on purpose so that the "Showcase Properties" get more traffic. Not 100% sure about that fact, but it makes sense that they would do that to push more visitors to the people that pay for the more expensive ads. I'm thinking that I may add more pictures to my listing, I believe the upgrade through JackKeller was only ~$100 or so. If I don't do that I may pay to have my ForSaleByOwner.com listing displayed prominently on their homepage for 14 days. It's only $49 for the local version and $99 for national, might be worthwhile for a one time thing. Either way I'll make up my mind before the weekend.

First Real Potential Buyer! (or our first showing)

Ok, in addition to a couple more realtor calls/email, I have someone coming by to look at the house soon and am amazed that there was a real buyer at the other end of the phone when a realtor called. We spent most of the weekend watching shows on what to do and what not to do with your house when you are showing it to potential buyers, so we'll see how this works out.

I will provide more info in the next few days depending on how things pan out (in a confidential manner of course), but am excited to do our first showing. I have prepared a few more detailed brochures (with floorplan, lotplan, etc), and will provide further details when I can. I know that this may be one of many, but opptys that go nowhere, but look forward to seeing some fruit from all this labor.

Contacts Rolling in

Well, I know someone is finally seeing all of my hard work. It hasn't paid off yet but there have been a few calls and some emails from Realtors and Mortgage brokers that are interested in "helping me out". So far I am not interested in this kind of help, but it is apparent that I am showing up in front of the right kind of eyeballs - and this is somewhat comforting. I am being nice to the people that do call and write in, because I may need them to bring me a buyer at some point in the future. I do wonder if there is an unwritten/unspoken rule nowadays with Realtors to not bother dealing with FSBO's because of the low commission rate that they are offering to bring a buyer in. More on this topic when I figure it out!