More U.S. home sellers are entering the For Sale By Owner (FSBO) market in order to maximize their profits from the sale of their home. According to a recent CNNMoney report, saving $10,000 to $12,000 or more on real estate agent fees provides plenty of incentive for homeowners to go it alone when it comes time to sell.
In response to this boom, veteran real estate broker and author Sissy Lappin and her husband Mark, a business process automation expert who has worked with Fortune 500 enterprises, have launched ListingDoor, an online FSBO site that provides profitable and powerful sales tools for homeowners, giving them everything they need to successfully sell their home on their own.
“Most existing FSBO sites do nothing more than list the home for a flat fee,” says Lappin, founder of ListingDoor.com. “What’s missing is an FSBO solution that guides homeowners from the time they decide to sell their property until the new owners move in – a streamlined process to ensure success. Homeowners now have a game-changing solution that Forbes suggests might be the “Uber for real estate”—ListingDoor.com.”
According to Lappin, the best person to disrupt an industry that severely restricts profit potential for consumers is someone who has long worked in that industry. Previous efforts to disrupt the real estate industry’s monopoly on home sales were led by people from outside the industry.
Today, homeowners have the ability to access all the same market information that real estate agents used to make off-limits to outsiders, allowing homeowners to efficiently determine the value of their home and market it themselves online, eliminating any justification for hiring a real estate agent, paying high commissions and losing valuable home equity.
Lappin has negotiated more than half a billion dollars in real estate sales nationwide, and written an FSBO guidebook “Simple and Sold” that has been downloaded more than 17,000 times from Amazon.com.
ListingDoor.com cost-effectively empowers FSBO sellers by providing all the information necessary for homeowners to price their homes and create a stellar listing, while providing the insider advice they need to succeed, all in one place. ListingDoor combines the best real estate industry practices with today’s technology in order for homeowners to sell their own homes like pros.
“On average, real estate agent commissions are $6,000 for every $100K a home is worth,” says Lappin. “In this context, a real estate commission should be seen for what it really is—a loss of as much as 40 to 50 percent of home equity.
Studies support Lappin’s view that for many sellers, real estate agents are not just of questionable value, but may be outright counter-productive. For instance, research from the National Bureau of Economic Research revealed that FSBO sellers enjoy a higher sales price compared to those who used a real estate agent. A 2013 Oxford University study about the future of employment found that 97 percent of real estate brokers jobs are at risk due to computerization.
“We’ve already seen how solutions like E*Trade, Legal Zoom and Turbo Tax have wrestled power away from middlemen, and put it in the hands of consumers,” Lappin says. “ListingDoor.com was built by real estate and FSBO experts to finally bring similar change to the real estate world.”
According to Lappin, not all sellers may want or need to take the FSBO route. But for the increasing number of people who do, ListingDoor.com offers everything they need in one place, and at a low cost.”