New Look, but Some Things Never Change
Welcome to FsboMadison. Despite the new look, we are still the same. Still owned and operated by Christie and Mary Clare. Still promoting the benefits of doing it yourself. Still collecting anecdotes about the positive experiences that people have had dealing directly, clearly, and honestly with each other as they transfer property ownership. But now, thanks to new graphics by Paul Zwief and better navigation and other amenities by David Zwiefelhofer we’ve got a new look that we are very happy with.
It has been eleven years since we began this effort to remove the barriers to selling your own home or buying directly from an owner. To say that it has been an effective effort would be an understatement. Maybe you are among the 14,000+ local sellers who have used FsboMadison or one of the 9,800+ buyers who have found their home through FsboMadison. Although FSBO (for sale by owner) is not for everyone, it is for most of us, as evidenced by the huge numbers in the Madison area who have done it successfully. It is generally much more straight-forward than you would imagine, usually requiring no more than a real estate attorney and a title company. Talk to your neighbors, relatives, and co-workers. Chances are you know someone who has used FsboMadison with great success. Welcome!
FsboMadison and the MLS
Over the past few years we have gotten more and more inquiries about the MLS (the Realtor-Owned Multiple Listing Service). A number of sellers have expressed concern that if they don’t have their property on the MLS to “maximize their exposure” they will not be able to sell. Maybe they are not that familiar with the Madison market or maybe they are in a very tight spot and don’t know what to do next. We understand that there is significant anxiety in the housing market currently. We don’t believe that the MLS is the answer to the changing market, but we have taken the steps to provide this option for those of you who feel you would like to add the MLS to a FsboMadison listing. We are still not realtors, but our Tech Support buddy of 10 years, David Zwiefelhofer, now has a real estate broker’s license and will provide access to the MLS for a very reasonable fee. You are still a fsbo seller, you will still do the work yourself, but if you feel you need to extend a hand to buyers with real estate agents (and agree to a buyer’s agent commission) David can help you out.
FsboMadison’s Policy of Exclusive Listings
Maintaining an “exclusive” listing policy has enabled us to gather and monitor a critical mass of local properties, thereby providing a website that is valuable to everyone looking for a property in the Dane County area. If the same fsbo properties are listed on every website in the book, the relevance and reliability will suffer. The details and text are going to differ as changes are made in one or several places, but not the rest. As a seller you may not feel that this is of any importance, as long as your house is sold. Recognize, however, that it is critically important to the existence of a reliable and viable alternative to the very long-term dominance of real estate agents.
If you value the benefits of a strong local fsbo presence, then you will understand that we can’t be everything to everybody. We have overcome many obstacles to achieve and maintain a well-recognized source for local fsbo properties, beginning with our own in 1998. Having other companies add FsboMadison-listed properties to their own real estate websites (done by numerous local sites and at least several West Coast companies, in one case with the details wildly inaccurate), twice asking the State Department of Regulation and Licensing to investigate us for “selling real estate without a license”, and persistently calling sellers to badger them to give up on fsbo and list on the MLS are just some of the many ways in which they’ve attempted to chip away at our presence in the market. Because of the rapid flow of information and the attending need to maintain the accuracy of information necessary for the sale of a property, we will still be running a tight ship. We will continue to list only properties that are not listed on database websites, other than David’s, with whom we will closely coordinate information updates.