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If
you visit our Internet home page, you’ll see tangible proof of a
truly remarkable good-news consumer story.
Prominently displayed there
is a constantly updated panel reporting that ComFree clients
conservatively have saved about $15 million (and counting) in
real estate commission fees since our private sales service
started here more than six years ago.
It’s a story of consumer
empowerment through education. It’s a story of how technology
has helped open the residential marketplace to a more
cost-effective, rational way of buying and selling homes.
And it’s also a story
that the mainstream media have chosen, for their own reasons,
not to report. But there’s a real, good-news story there
nonetheless: That thousands of home-owners have benefited to the
tune of thou-sands of dollars each by simply taking control of
their own home sale.
We all know we can book
our own airline tickets or buy our own house or life insurance
or stocks and save by eliminating the middle man. And now we
know we can save far more money than doing any of those other
things by selling our own home. It’s the age of consumer
empowerment.
ComFree’s empowered
clients save about $6,000 on average. That’s $6,000 |
that stays in the community and
that our customers can use to buy new furnishings or a better
home or reduce debt.
With thousands of success stories to fuel it, ComFree’s red-hot
growth continues. Nearing the year’s mid-point, ComFree’s sales
are up 57 per cent over the same period last year. And 2001 was
a year of strong growth, too.
There are other
indicators that show the extent to which private sale has become
an important part of the way real estate is done now in
Manitoba. One service unique to ComFree is our Automated
Telephone Information system. Prospective buyers can call our
auto info number, put in the code number for a home they’re
interested in and receive enough information to decide whether
this could be the home for them, before they call our clients.
Earlier this spring, the system was fielding 1,000 calls a week.
Now volume has double to 2,000 a week.
But the most impressive
indicator has been seen on our Internet site,
www.comfree.ca. We started
tracking net volume a year ago. Since then, traffic (mostly
people searching for a home) has exploded by 400 per cent.
Good news all around,
for ComFree and particularly for Manitoba’s homebuyers and
sellers.
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