Buying, Selling on the WEB
With about 80 % of all homebuyers now turning to the Internet for help while they shop, Realtors are finding their own ways to take advantage of the trend.
One Denver broker has even begun caring his colleagues to manage their ads on craigslist, the popular free online clearinghouse, and to monitor the traffic those ads generate.
Mark Cramer, a broker at Coldwell Banker-Devonshire, charges other brokers $39.95 per month to re-post home listings and related pictures every three days on craigslist. Because the pictures are kept on Cramer's private computer server, he can count how many times they are viewed by potential clients.
Craigslist, www.craigslist.com, has been touted as the world's seventh-most-visited website, with about 3 billion hits per month. Users search through bare-bones home pages to find cities or regions they're interested in.
Ads are posted by date in egalitarian fashion. So re-posting or updating an ad keeps it closer to the top of the page, where it presumably would be seen by more people.
"My wife and I have found a lot of business that way, " Cramer said. His posting service includes proprietary software that he unveiled publicly for the first time last week at a Coldwell Banker convention.
"When asked about Cramer's service, craigslist president Jim Buckmaster issued a terse e-mail response: 'The company has discussed charging customers for some ads in some markets, including real estate and job ads, but so far has not done so.
"Charging customers for placing free ads on craigslist is banned by our terms of use." Buckmaster said. "We have no plans to charge for anything in Denver for the foreseeable future."
Because Cramer is charging his customers for data entry and management, he believes he does not go against the website's terms of use.
Denver-based Metro Brokers Inc. recently decided to launch a website, ColoradoHomeStop.com, that shares with consummers information about all homes on the market in Colorado. The real eastate company's 2,000 members paid more than $2 million to develop the site, which is expected to someday incorporate the state's 22 multiple listing services.
"ounger clients go out and do the legwork online," Cramer said. "A lot of people thought the Internet would completely blow the Realtor out of the equation. but given the complexity of contracts and the changing nature of the contracts. I don't think the REaltor will ever not be part of the process."
Surveys at the National Association of Realtors show essentially the same thing, said spokesman Walter Molony. About 80 % of consumers now look online first when they want to buy a home, compared with 2 % in 1995, Molony said. Some 80 % of real estate firms now have their own websites, he said.
"One of the projections was that the Internet would disintermediate, and the number of agents would drop precipitously," Molony said. "Our agents have mushroomed. People who use the Internet as a tool are more likely to use an agent to close the transaction for them."
The trade group's survey, from July 2005 to June 2006, showed 53 % of buyers go to some sort of metro area website to research an area they're interested in; 52 % go to www.realtor.com; 41 % go to specific real estate company websites; 40 % go to individual agent websites; 14 % go to newspaper websites; and 6 % go to magazine websites. The total is more than 100 % because respondents said they checked more than one venue. Molony said.
In the survey, 36 % of buyers first learned about the homes they bough from a real estate agent, compared with 24 % from the Internet, Molony said.
"People cast a really wide net in looking for a home. They do the process, they do their home work, then they contact the real estate agent." Molony said, "The agent is more likely to find a better match."