subject: Most Popular Methods To Market Your Home [print this page] Have you been trying to sell a house with no success? I saw some interesting statistics lately on the subject of for sale by owner, or FSBO as professionals in the real estate business usually call it. These statistics are all from the 2010 National Association of REALTORS (NAR) Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers. As of 2010, only 9% of homes sold were for sale by owner in the United States. According to Wikipedia, however, and these statistics are a couple years older, 20% to 30% of homes in Canada are sold by owner, meaning without a real estate agent's involvement. Critics of the NAR profile say that the real US percentage is more like 20% because at least 10% of for sale by owner transactions are paying a real estate broker a flat fee for listing on the multiple listing service.
Whatever the national statistics may be, most homeowners are more concerned about what it will mean for them personally if they decide to sell a home for sale by owner. To satisfy their curiosity, I'll quote the NAR Profile again to share more statistics of interest to individual homeowners.
Here are "methods used to market home" statistics for you:
Listing on the internet - 27%
For Sale By Owner website - 11%
Yard sign - 46%
Friends and neighbors - 39%
Newspaper ad - 12%
Open house - 14%
Take a good look at that list again, and slow down when you come to these items: listing on the internet, yard sign and friends and neighbors. Those items reflect the largest percentages by far, and they are definitely the things to do when you are selling for sale by owner. I've been telling sellers for years to post their own homes on craigslist.com and ebayclassifieds.com whether they are working with an agent or not. Ads posted by the owner will command more attention than broker ads, and it's all about getting the attention of more than 63 million people per month looking at craigslist ads.
That's another statistic you might want to keep in mind, how many people are looking at craigslist. It is truly one of your most powerful marketing tools when you're selling for sale by owner, no matter where you live. The good, old-fashioned yard sign comes in first, however, followed by talking to friends and neighbors. Even the internet cannot win over grass-roots, word-of-mouth advertising that can only happen when real people talk to each other. Of course, a lot of that goes on in emails and on Facebook these days, too. Even people in the same neighborhood are likely to communicate online these days.
