On May 10 a representative of BuyOwner.com met with me at my home and I eventually signed an agreement to list my home through BuyOwner. I did ask some informed questions about how effective the service was and what their average turnover period (# days before selling was). I coughed up $3,600 for their service and within about 10 days there was a Web listing of my home with photograps.
For about two weeks, I got a reasonable amount of traffic through my home and then it started to fall off rapidly.in three months of listing the propert through BuyOwner, I have only had about 15 potential buyers tour the porperty in three months. I would estimate that only about half of these came through BuyOwner's 1-800 contact referral service. The rest were generated by simple drive-by traffic and brochures that I keep stocked in the "Take One" tube on top of the sign.
I am a professional marketer and have a PhD in marketing research, so I tend to pay attention to the demographics of buyers. It became obvious very early on that the people callig me on referral from BuyOwner were mostly of Indian and Pakistani origin and worked in technical areas. The traffic generated by potential drive-by buyers was much more diverse (more Anglo, somewhat older, and less likely to work in the tech sector) as would be expected in the area of Fort Worth in which I live. Now I have no problem with Indians or Pakistanis, but this small sample result tells me three things:
(1) BuyOwner does not work. It does not generate any significant increase in buyer traffic over comparable For Sale By Owner efforts.
(2) The demographics of potential buyers referred by BuyOwner are oriented to male, recently-immigrated South Asians, that work in technical areas and are more likely to use Web searches.
(3) Most potential buyers either do not perform detailed Web searches that are likely to produce a listing of my home, or the do not use the Web at all for their home search efforts.
My advice to prospective BuyOwner clients and others trying to sell their house through similar Web-oriented services is simple - don't do it. BuyOwner sounds like a good idea, but it just does not work very well. BuyOwner will tell you all their "success stories", but they don't even have a reliable tracking system in place that tells them when a home is sold, so they really don't know how effective it is from the seller's standpoint.
If you want to save money, put up a For Sale By Owner sign and get yourself a tube or similar device for despensing brochures. If moving your home quickly is a goal, then list it with a local broker that subscribes to an area multilist service.
Most brokers will agree to list the property for 2% with a 3% commission to the agent. That's a total of 5%. Since I have already wasted the equivalent of 1.3% of the listing price on trying to sell my home, I would have been far better off simply listing it with a realtor on the front-end.
Another advantage of a traditional broker listing is that noramlly you can list the property at, or near, the price of area comparables and offset the commissions to some extent. Web-based referrals, especially those that come from cultures where bargaining is a way of life, often approach buying by making rediculous offers and demands hoping to find a bargain.
I very much regret pissing away $3,600 on BuyOwner. I would not recommend the service to anyone simply because it does not work very well and is certainly not worth the kind of money I spent on it. I would have been far better off simply listing it with multilist realtor and taking a hit on the higher commissions.
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