Online Florida Home Loans Expand to eBay; Home Sellers Find New Avenues
Auctions. Home staging. Outright begging, perhaps. We’re covered numerous ways in which sellers attempt to lure in Florida home loan offers during a slow market, but there’s a recent trend we missed - and you may have purchased concert tickets from it.
Sign online and scrol past eBay’s “pottery and glass” category; just before “stamps and sports memorabilia,” you should see the category: “real estate.” Be more specific, enter the keywords, Florida real estate, and take a look at all the listings.
At one point last week, the online auction house listed 528 Florida real estate and time-share properties; about three out of every 10 on the auction block were from the South Florida housing market. What gives?
The surge of Florida homes online
eBay is flush with time-share and vacation home ads because those are focused on out-of-towners. The Web hits areas around the world, spouting these properties’ attributes. Also, however, plenty of South Florida sellers are looking closer to home.
For example, Boca Raton businessman Giovanni DiStadio dipped into eBay this year with an ad for Bella Lago, a 32-villa West Palm Beach property. Asking price: $5.2 million. He got more than 3,000 hits, and did sell individual units — some are still available, he emphasizes — but the hoped-for big deal did not materialize.
Similarly creative online sales tactics aren’t confined to eBay. There’s eAgent Inc., a Reston, Va.-based firm that matches Florida home loan buyers and agents via Google and other search engines. The firm’s second-heaviest concentration of licensed “e-agents” is in Florida.
“I think what has happened is that the search engines have sort of leveled the playing field between business and consumers,” said Joshua Konowe, president and chief executive of eAgent. “Consumers now dictate how they wish to look at something. If you don’t give it to them, they go somewhere else.”
It’s a far cry from the days when home buyers thumbed through the thick bound listings of properties in a real estate office. But times are changing and agents need to adjust to a new world of Florida home loans. They better have an Internet connection.
