Flat Fee MLS

How to sell your home when prices start to level off

Reports abound that the real estate market is heading for a slowdown. Depending upon the recent runup in your area, the landing could be hard or soft. Here are some strategies for selling in a level or declining market:

Find a good discount broker - Internet companies now provide services for home sellers that weren’t available just a few years ago. Flat fee MLS listing is now a good option that allows you to keep more of your home equity. Instead of paying a listing commission for inclusion of your property in the Realtor MLS and on Realtor.com, you can pay a flat fee of somewhere between $400 and $500 and get the same exposure as Realtor listed properties.

Get proper pricing assistance - correctly valuing your property is ALWAYS priority #1 when selling your home. Lots of online services provide access to property sales data. You can also get this information yourself with a trip to the local property assessor’s office. If you have a unique or unusual property or have made major upgrades, your best route is a professional appraisal. Although this is a bit more expensive than other alternatives, it truly provides the most accurate valuation. 2 truisms apply: 1) You get what you pay for 2) appraisal isn’t an exact science

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Another housing valuation site?

With all the hoopla surrounding the launch of Zillow.com, Richard Bartons the founder of Expedia.com’s newest venture, I was expecting something that might revolutionize the real estate industry in the way Expedia helped to transform the travel industry. Instead we get a website providing online home valuations??!! The website launch’s anticipation build-up by the media created a traffic frenzy that apparently took Zillow offline for most of the day yesterday.

I’m sorry, but online Comparative Market Analysis (CMA) just isn’t very exciting. The website looks nice and there’s an easy to use interface, but there are plenty of players already in the market offering similar services, albeit, not for free. For instance, HouseValues.com services come with the baggage that your contact information is fed to hungry real estate agents in your area. They make money off of referrrals, so I guess Zillow represents a step up for consumers in that regard. ElectronicAppraiser.com offers housing sale statistics for consumers for a modest price.

From interviews with Barton, it seems that the goal is web traffic and then turning that traffic into revenue in some form or fashion. The idea of capturing enough online viewers to make SOMETHING happen worked fairly well for Expedia. So what’s the end game here. It’s not apparent how the revenue will be generated except perhaps from advertising.

One is left to believe that there has to be another or two offering still to come from this website. Perhaps the free house valuation is a lead-in to other ventures. Otherwise, I’m not sure what all the excitement was about.

See Also

• Zillow
  Founder of Expedia launches home valuation website

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