Maybe the U.S. Housing Market has Bottomed-Out?

This could be the great news everyone is waiting for regarding our incredibly bad real estate market. The early indications are no where near definite or even mildly conclusive and is at best circumstantial. However, it is the first good news on the nationwide housing market we gave seen in ages.

First, the media is reporting over the past few days some good signs of a recovery in housing, sales and construction stats. The media is also full of stories about lots of foreign investors buying homes in the U.S. Just this morning ABC’s Good Morning America reported the National Association of Realtors reports existing home sales for February 2009 were the best since July 2003.

GMA also reported “housing vultures” (including many foreign investors) were buying homes in high numbers (sometimes 100 homes at a time in bulk) and the investors were going on real estate tours of the U.S. Investors from places such as Australia, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, China and of course U.S. Investors too.

Next I would like to report on personal experiences in my area in Arizona. First, we have noticed far more Realtors with buyers touring the neighborhood recently. On another personal level we have seen a noticeable uptick in traffic going to a real estate website we run FreeMLSlisting.com.

In fact, a check of yesterdays traffic data reveals more visitors on Mar 23 2009 vs any other day on the chart, which covers a few months of web site visitor activity. Looking at more statistics supplied by Google we noticed an important statistic had its best day yesterday since Nov 3 2008.

Please keep in mind the upbeat information is by no means conclusive or proven to be statistically valid but nevertheless it certainly is quite encouraging to the nationwide war on foreclosures and the real estate market to say the least.

Home-seller edge thanks to new type MLS listing

What with the real estate market being so terribly depressed and nationwide values declining home-sellers need every possible advantage they can get. Perhaps the best possible edge for home-sellers in today’s very tough real estate market what with all the low-priced foreclosures and recession is to enjoy a degree of price flexibility. Thus, if need be, the seller can drop their asking price even below the ideal price they had in mind and under the competing neighbors home price too.

That’s tough to do when needing to pay a Realtor® 6% or 7% commission to list and sell the home. However, the seller can now pay about one-half of the usual costly commissions by getting in the MLS basically free (no commission to get listed) and then only paying the buyers agent upon successful sale.

Here is an example of the substantial savings. Let us assume a property sells for say $500,000 and the home seller seller offers a 3% commission to the Buyer’s Agent. Based on a $500,000 sale price the commission would be $15,000 due the broker who actually brings he buyer, and a small flat rate listing fee of $297 to pay the referral firm to send the listing to their business associate real estate broker who lists the property in the-MLS. The typical fee just to get listed on the MLS is a additional 3%, or $15,000 in our example.

Using this example, the total savings in real-estate commissions is $14,703. Now, for the comparison in savings if you listed your home with a traditional broker for say 6%. The commission on a $500,000 sale with a 6% commission rate would be a high $30,000 which is 3% more commission and $15,000 in money vs a flat-rate mls listing. How incredible is that anyway!

This is the latest and best way to list and sell your home at substantial savings. America’s #1 flat fee mls listing firm with experience doing unique flat-fee mls listings dating back to 2002 is FlatFee.org. With Nationwide Coverage areas, Low Price fee and good customer service with client satisfaction, where very low overhead keeps the MLS-Listing cost so extremely low, Which low-cost gives you good price flexibility if needed, but without surrendering so much of your equity to the real estate brokers.