Realty411 Magazine The Future of Real Estate is Here

Learn about ListedBy.com Stephan Piscano The real estate market continues its aggressive ascend back from the ash- es of 2008 and is showing no signs or desire to slow down any time soon. With interest rates at all time lows, the landscape for investors seems just right even for the less aggressive types. ListedBy founder and chief exec- utive officer, and real estate investment veteran Stephan Piscano has been one of the most successful – and daring – investors to take advantage of the recent market drop. While he spends time building online auction site ListedBy.com, his investor acumen continues to spot opportunities along the way. If you heard or read Stephan’s predictions for the real estate market a year ago, and you followed his advice, you would know he was spot on. Today we’re happy to join Stephan to get insight into some of his investing strategies and plans for the future, and how real estate investors and real estate professionals can benefit from using ListedBy.com. Q: Stephan, you created the website ListedBy.com to meet the needs that you personally had experienced and ob- served in the online sector as a real estate investor. Can you give us a brief rundown of what ListedBy.com is and how it helps investors meet their needs? A: Thanks Roger, I am excited and thankful to discuss this here on Realty411. As many who follow ListedBy know, I created the site after liquidating several real estate assets online through sites such as eBay and others. At the time it became clear to me after searching literally for years that there was no website out there that allowed me to have the marketplace functionality I needed to properly market my listings, and do it in a setting that promoted trust and openness. With that in mind we went live with ListedBy.com to harness the marketplace functionality of a site such as eBay, but tailor it to real estate, and we added the key piece of the social net- work which we modeled after LinkedIn to give the buyers the ability to not only research the property that they were buying, but also research the person they are buying it from. This cre- ates more direct communication between the parties and since we never play middleman as our competition does, we create a setting where transactions are much more likely to take place. This functionality allows an investor to not only research real estate online, but actually make a BUYING ACTION through the site and be in DIRECT contact with a person that can actu- ally accept that action all online and all at no cost. Q. That seems comprehensive. So it sounds like the key aspect of the site is transparency? A: Yes you could say that. It is really all about cutting out the Realty411Guide.com middle man and allowing the buyer to be in direct contact with either the property owner, or the actual list agent. Many websites try to either limit the communication between the parties so they don’t get cut out, or they route traffic to their own buyers’ agents so the buyer ends up dealing with an agent that knows nothing about them, and nothing about the property itself. That can be beneficial to first time buyers who need their hand held a bit more, but to an investor it sim- ply slows everything down and wastes time. ListedBy.com dramatically speeds up the process for the buyer and creates targeted exceptional exposure for the owner/agent. Q: Well that sounds great but I’m assuming that Brokers and Agents are not too happy about being cut out of the loop. A: Oh No I’m happy you asked about that because that is actually one of the biggest misconceptions that people have about the site when they hear about the model. While it is true that of course an owner could use our site directly with a buyer, the reality of it is that the majority of transactions happening on our site take place with agents, and we have actually found that, believe it or not, the agent benefits from our site more than anyone else. By removing the middle man and routing the DIRECT buyer traffic straight to the list agent, it gives the listing agent the opportunity to double-end the transaction and effectively put twice as much revenue in their pocket. In addition to that we have actually heard from several agents that by building out their social network profile on the site with photos, bio, and client recommendations, they have actually gotten new PAGE 27 • 2014 > reWEALTHmag.com

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