Whenever I speak to a Minnesota home owner who is thinking about selling their home, I discuss the technology I use to help market the home, and how implementing the power of the Internet is a big factor in my real estate success.
Statistics are extremely important when selling a home, so some data that I go over with a seller includes the infamous “Where do Buyers Come From?”. Below is current information for the 2008 real estate market in Minnesota. As you can see, 33% of home buyers found the home they bought through a real estate agent. (Please note, this means the agent showed them homes and one of those homes was bought by the buyer. It does not mean that only 33% of buyers used a real estate agent to purchase a home.)
The next piece of data which is so important is that 45% of Minnesota home buyers found the home they bought via the Internet. Wow! That is huge, and shows right away how important it is to market a home for sale on-line in our state.
Please also note, for those of you who still believe in print advertising, that in Minnesota, only 2% of buyers found their home from the newspaper, and only 1% found their home from a home book or magazine. Print advertising is dead and just doesn’t bring in the buyers.
Now looking further into the national statistics for “How do Buyer’s Find Homes?“, the National Association of Realtors has compiled data since 2001 of real estate trends concerning this issue. As you can see in the below table, over the last eight years, buyers finding their home, from the research of a real estate agent, has decreased 14%. At the same time, and probably the most dramatic change, is that buyers have increasingly found their homes via the Internet, up from 8% in 2001 to 32% in 2008. Wow!
When you look at Minnesota versus National, you can easily see that the Internet is more readily used in a buyer’s home search, 45% to 32%. So for home sellers, if you don’t hire an agent that is Internet savvy, you could be losing market time and money in selling your home.
For the small minority of people out there who feel the Internet is making the real estate agent obsolete, please know that even with all these buyers using the Internet to search for homes, 86% of these buyers are still utilizing a real estate agent to help with the home search and purchase. The good agents are using the power of the Internet for success, integrating it into their marketing plan to help facilitate the sale of their client’s home.
