Bart Wilson

Showing FSBOs to potential home buyers is just another part of the what the top 10% agents do. Sure, some FSBOs will insist on working it alone or with an attorney, but at the end of the day let's face the facts. Many REALTORS are starving. For many of us -- the Buyers Market sucks. What's wrong with letting FSBOs get some exposure on Realtor.com or any other real estate portal? Many FSBOs who go it alone alone will buy the 88 cent orange and black lettered FOR SALE sign, stick it to a vampire stake and put this in their yard and they run an ad in the local Thrifty Nickel or newspaper. This is no way to market or sell a home. Most of these FSBOs become disenchanted within 60 days and then seek the help of a licensed REALTOR anyway. I spoke to Move.com yesterday on the phone. He admitted there are FSBOs on Realtor.com but they are in fact represented by either a full service or a discount service broker. Bart Wilson Founder & CMO Voyager International

But Realtor.com already HAS FSBO's on their site. They're just cleverly disguised as a broker sponsored listing -- which looks like, feels like and tastes like the real thing. Some agents call them: Ghost listings. Call them whatever you want. FSBO's. Short Sales. REOs. Some homes come now with owner financing. Our real estate market has changed quite dramatically. What's the big deal in letting Realtor.com open up to FSBO's labelled as FSBO's and not the FSBO disguised as an MLS listing. To Hell with the rules and MLS politics. REALTORS are starving. The full service 6% sales commission isn't a one size fits all for every home seller today. Brokers aren't pumping out any more commission check advances. It's pretty clear things have been bad but many will agree no one has seen the bottom of the Buyers Market yet, either. Here in Santa Fe, there's more than a handful of agents I know who have already placed FSBO's into the MLS and they're showing up on Realtor.com. I just hung up with one agent on the phone who admitted there must be at least 200 FSBO listings are in the SFAR MLS. Let's look at the greed issue for a minute. Good point by Lloyd. Greed was the main agenda behind Homestore.com's Stuart Wolff and a few executives not too many years ago. They did a great job at destroying their own company by violating SEC regulations. They got caught in an advertising scheme with buying ads to inflate (artificially) their stock. A few of the plea bargains resulted in smaller penalties for those responsible and they gave back a lot of money and stock but things got so bad... the firm was forced to change their name to Move.com. Greed showed up again with the Showcase Listings idea that came out a few years ago. This involved direct tele-marketers calling REALTORS asking them to Biggie Size their listings as Showcase listings on Realtor.com. You get to shell out $500 to $2,900 of your hard earned commissions per year to add virtual tours to your listings and you get a creme or blue colored tab and a higher position. There's just one problem with this new service. No one is giving Voyager, or Obeo, or CirclePix of any other national virtual tour hosting provider any part of the showcase listings fee they charged the REALTOR. We still have to pay for the servers, and the power and the refrigerated rooms. We have to pay the salaries of the people to run them. No one at Move.com-Realtor.com bothered to ask us about any revenue share from this new program. So when agents biggie size their Showcase listings, we have to link the tours and or videos to Realtor.com for FREE with links that come from our servers. I don't recall giving Realtor.com or Move.com permission to do any of this. Every link to Realtor.com used to be $25 bucks. Now, 80% of them are free and we're stuck paying the server bills. Smells like another lawsuit to me. Bottom Line: The MLS monopoly is breaking up. Trulia.com. Zillow.com. Kayyah.com. ForSaleByOwner.com and there's more coming. The days of the book isn't coming back. The Internet and innovation isn't going to die and go away. Bart Wilson Founder & CMO Voyager International

This is huge news. We have been patiently waiting for the lawsuit to help break up the good old boy MLS monopoly and this is big news. We will be adding FSBOs from 17 states soon to Realtor.com-Move.com from our state-enabled Kayyah.com servers. As for real estate professionals, it means homes can sell faster and you can help the FSBOs if you're willing to take a lower sales commission. In today's economy everybody is working twice as hard for 50% less pay. Do you honestly think that our 6 or 7% sales commission is going to be immune to the economic changes every other market sector has seen? If you do, it's time to pull your head out of the sand and take off your rose tinted glasses now. There are a lot of FSBOs who want to work with a REALTOR, but just not at a 6% sales commission. This is why God made discount brokerages like Help U Sell and Assist 2 Sell. Sure there is a lot of work to do for any real estate transaction, but times are changing. This is a big wake up call for today's modern, rank and file REALTORS. "If you don't like change... you're going to like irrelevance even less." - Gen. Erik Shinseki. Former US Army Chief of Staff. Bart Wilson Founder & CMO Voyager International Kayyah.com