A new company started by a Realtor and targeting listing agents is creating surveys to educate Realtors about the attitudes of homeselling consumers. The purpose is to give these professionals information that isn't available elsewhere so they can better serve sellers.

The Home Seller Consumer Insights: 2002-2003 is a 67-page survey that interviewed hundreds of Realtor-represented sellers and FSBO sellers. The purpose of the survey is to show that Realtors "have to prove that they can do things better than the FSBO," says Steve Leeker, Realtor, founder of Realty Viewpoint.

Leeker explains, "The industry is rapidly changing. Our concern is that there is so much information on the Internet that sellers believe they can do this all themselves. Agents should be aware that if they want to work with more sellers they have to concentrate on things that are agent-specific, like pricing the property correctly and bringing in buyers. The purpose of our survey is to show Realtors that they have to prove they can do things better than the FSBO."

To create the survey, Leeker employed the services of independent statistician Karen Bickel, whose clients also include Proctor and Gamble and the Veterans Administration. The surveys were submitted through NFO Worldgroup, a market research company, to sellers who had sold their homes within the last twelve months either through a real estate professional (78 percent) or as a FSBO (21 percent.) The sellers came from across the four major statistical areas, the Northeast, Midwest, South and West. The surveys were sent to a nationally representative base of one million sellers, and results were based on 475 usable respondents.

Among the findings: On average, sellers are selling their homes every eight to nine years. Sellers will increasingly sell their homes as FSBOs over the next cycle of 8-9 years because the majority of FSBO sellers are young and feel they did a good job selling their homes, says Leeker.

Among the bombshells: Through home purchase and resale prices reported by all the sellers, FSBOs make more money on their home sales than sellers who use real estate agents and sell their homes three weeks sooner.

If you want to find out how FSBOs beat real estate professionals, you'll have to order the report for $49.

Because Home Seller Consumer Insights: 2002-2003 is for sale as a report, Realty Times is unable to attach the PDF file here, but Leeker was very accommodating in sharing some of his conclusions.

"It's really important to look at the price the sellers' need as well as the price they want," suggests Leeker.

He feels it is time that the industry consider new business models such as unbundled services that allow Realtors better participation in sales of homes where the seller has little or no equity or a high income to debt ratio."

"Agents aren't giving sellers enough information to show them what they are really going to make on the home and what their costs are going to be," he says.

"We are doing research to provide insights about the real estate industry so that brokers and agents can better position themselves," says Leeker.