FSBO BLOG

I am excited to have created a profile on a website called www.activerain.com to.  Please feel free to check it out at:  http://activerain.com/malkasian1

ActiveRain is a Bellevue, WA based technology/media company hybrid that operates the largest and most active social network in the real estate space.  This site mainly benefits Real Estate industry Professionals, but I just thought I would share it with you.  I plan to duplicate my current blog on there to raise more awareness for FSBO.com and its customers. 

If you have any experience with Activerain.com, please feel free to share your experiance with us.

If so, I wanted to ask for your help on two questions:

•1.       Can you recommend the best tracking or monitoring system for a Blog through Wordpress?  (looking for more accurate traffic statistics)

•2.      What suggestions do you have on Spam/Bogus comments that I seem to be getting on a daily basis.

Any help or advice you could give would be greatly appreciated. 

Ok, we have a winner.  Dahlia of North Pole, AK successfully guessed that it took me 23 takes to shoot the intro portion of my First video.  So far the feedback from the 2^nd video has been that it was much better, so at least I am improving. 

Since Dahlia’s listing is current “Under Contract” she will not be needing the Virtual tour.  I have decided to simply reimburse her for her Gold Package Listing ($99.95) for her participation and for winning my first ever contest. 

Since I can’t help to promote her listing (because it is Sold), I have asked if she was willing to answer a few questions for me regarding her experience with FSBO.com.  I have in no way modified her answers:

1. Did your buyer find you on FSBO.com, if so, by phone or email?

Our buyer is our friend from church, but we were contacted a lot this spring from potential buyers via the fobs website.

2. What other methods of advertising did you use: Other websites, newspaper, word of mouth, etc…?

We used (unsuccessfully) the newspaper on Sundays, and we posted flyers at the air force and army bases, as well as posted our house on ahrn.com (a military housing service) and also on baseforsale.com (a free classified website for the military).  Here in North Pole, AK, we are surrounded to the north and south by military, and they were our target market.  The other websites and flyers always had our FSBO.com listing, so the other forms of marketing always brought them to our website on FSBO.com
 

3. How long was your property on FSBO.com before going under contract?

We posted it in July, which, is the tail-end of house-hunting season here in Alaska (winter will be setting in and families usually don’t want to move in freezing, snowy weather) so we were late in doing that, but by February, we had an accepted offer!

4. Briefly describe your experience with FSBO.com, from the sign up process, uploading photos (did you do it yourself), receiving your supplies via UPS, leads received, etc…

It was the best site that we found for the “bang for our buck”.  It was very simple to make our site - we started uploading photos and had it going in probably less than an hour!  We received our sign and flyers very quickly (thank you UPS!).  We were very pleased with the customer service:  we posted a photo of our house just to get one on the site, but it wasn’t the “keeper” photo.  We had asked for our flyers to not be printed until we got an acceptable photo of our house on the site and because they had already been printed, we received another set of flyers with the correct photo on them!  Thank you!!  We will definitely use FSBO.com again - we saved so much by NOT using a realtor!  Great idea and keep up the excellent work!!

Thanks again for everyone who participated, and as promised, I will be sending all of you a consolation prize via email shortly. 

Mike Malkasian

I heard about an interesting blog the other day, and just had to share it with everyone.  It is called “Bad MLS Photo of the Day“.  When you have a minute, I suggest you take a look at some of these photos to learn what “not” to do when getting ready to take and post pictures of your home on your FSBO Listings. 

The beauty of Digital Photos is that you can take as many as you want, and delete the bad ones.  Please try to take care in the photos you are posting.  There is no rush.  Go through and pick the best ones to post.  If you don’t have any, go back and retake them.  You will be happy that you did.

“Bad MLS Photo of the Day“

 The 2007 Remodeling Cost vs. Value Report  produced by Hanley Wood, LLC and the NAR was recently released, and should help us to better answer this question.  Is remodeling worth it?

Keeping in mind that each home has unique needs and specifications, this information should help the majority of us to best decide where to spend your remodeling dollars,  if at all.  I’ll spend the remainder of this week discussing information provided by the report, and highlight which projects will most likely help your home sell, while recouping the majority of your costs. 

Please feel free to jump in with your own home remodeling experiences, and let us know if you have had any success or failures that we can all learn from.  I know I have plans early next year to upgrade a kitchen on a home I am preparing to sell, and according to the new report, I have a good chance of recovering up to 83% of my cost.