Here in the San Francisco East Bay Area, if you have a clean, well maintained and properly priced listing, you are going to get offers. We are definitely seeing multiple offers these days and in many cases, homes are selling above asking price.
So, the name of the game for agents is to get listings! But, I hear from many agents each week that coming up with listings is no easy task. With thousands of agents at work in our area , you really have to be at the top of your game to get enough listing opportunities to keep your business growing.
There is one often overlooked way to come up with listing leads and that is to work FSBOs. (For Sale By Owners).
I know, I know, conventional wisdom says that there are no FSBOs available. So, I am going to ask you to challenge that belief, because in a matter of 10 minutes I used a FREE tool to identify 39 FSBOs on Zillow! Almost all of them had phone numbers, the address is obviously on the FSBO listing and some even have the owner’s name!
Did I mention that the tool is free?
The way it works, is that you go to the site, give up your email address, and then you are directed to a page where you plug in the zip code that you are interested in searching, choose the search radius of 5, 10 or 15 miles and hit submit. The tool is provided by Guerilla Realty, which offers a selection of tools and trainings. They will contact you by email and you will be on their mailing list, but you can always unsubscribe at any time.
It does take a bit of time to generate the results, my last search of 94506 and a 15 mile radius took about 10 minutes to fully complete, and yielded 39 results! That’s just amazing to me that there would be that many!
Each found result gives you a button to click to see the full listing info, and once there, you can see that it is listed by owner. If you click the “Contact Agent” button near the top, you get a popup with 3 agents to choose from PLUS the option to contact the owner!
Just to be on the safe side, before contacting the owner, I would run a quick MLS address search to see if the property was listed with an agent. If it is listed with an agent then ethically you cannot contact them. But if the MLS search comes up empty, then they are fair game!
Working FSBOs requires some patience and a light touch to get the best results, but from my own experiences gleaned from building my business based almost entirely on FSBOs and Expired Listings, I can tell you that it is worth the effort.
Now that you have a free and effortless way of identifying FSBOs near you, will you actually give it a try?
If the answer is yes, simply go to: https://fizbonanza.com/ and get busy!
