An interesting new online for-sale-by-owner company According to RealBlogging: "By Owner MLS, has just announced a free, online, public-domain listing service, linking together the homes, condos, timeshares, rentals, vacation homes, town homes, multifamily homes, vacant and commercial properties of many different FSBO companies. No registration is required and every property is linked back to its originating for-sale-by-owner site." For more information go to ByOwnerMLS.com.
This is an interesting "collaborative" business model on several levels.
- They're pulling together (or linking) the previously fragmented property sites listed above into a an easy to use search engine.
- They don't require that the user "register" to use the search engine (lead generation).
- The standard and advanced search engines are easy to use.
- There is an Appraise Now! feature from the listing page.
- From the listing page you can also click on (More listings in "Your County")
I used the simple State / City dropdown menus for Bloomington, IL expecting NO results from this national FSBO site. To my surprise, it actually had three current FSBO listings.
I clicked on the read more link and was taken to the ByOwnerMLS listing page. In my case, it was a sub-branded listing from FSBO.com.
When the listing came up, I was surprised to to find in the summary data section an [Appraise Now!] feature. As an appraiser, I couldn't RESIST clicking on THAT link! I found that ElectronicAppraiser had also collaborated in this business model.
This article by Money magazine tested six of the leading online appraisers on the accuracy of their appraisals.
"At $29.95 for a report, Electronic Appraiser is not cheap. But it appears you get what you pay for -- a full report with mapped (but not interactive) comparables, a rundown of census data for the county, including contact information for schools, churches and businesses -- and a roughly 50% chance that your estimate is within 5% of the likely sales price. Being right just half the time might get a human appraiser fired. Yet, in the world of online AVMs, this is top performance."
The article didn't test certified appraisers or realtors on their predictive skills, but a certified appraiser in the article implied that appraisers expect their predictions to be within 5% of the final sales price.
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