Ever visited 9 apartments and houses in one day in search of a new abode? The past couple of weeks I’ve been helping a colleague to find a place to live in Amsterdam. And when we arrived at number 9, the Realtor® told us his maximum per day was 6 objects shown. Not bad – we’d reached 150% visited!

It one thing to host a property and real estate classifieds site. As you’re not actually transacting real estate, there is no requirement to be a registered Realtor or to have other certificates. However you do need to know about the market and the types of people placing their ads on the site. These weeks have been a learning experience for me that I hope will benefit Khusan.

During my life I’ve moved more than 20 times and lived in three different countries on two continents. I’ve actually only bought and sold one property – the rest was rented. Additionally I’ve helped a lot of people to find, rent or sell their house or apartment. I’ve even sold two companies, one including a commercial office rental contract.

My latest project is to help my wife’s job replacement move to Amsterdam. This requires finding a proper house in Amsterdam as well as selling her house where she now lives. She wants to see if she can sell her house without the use of a Realtor and this means stepping into the FSBO (For Sale By Owner) realm. And this is exactly what Khusan is all about.

My first site to use was Funda, the conglomerate of Realtors here in Holland, and most popular national real estate site. To my suprise, I saw that Funda is currently also listing FSBO properties. This I totally had not expected. One of the reasons we set up Khusan was to offer some balance to the big real estate MLS sites. To now see Holland’s biggest site also take on FSBO listings was not something I had predicted. I guess it shows that there is a sufficient demand for FSBO to even interest the MLS sites to get involved. My own research had already shown that between 12% to 25% of a country’s property owners prefer the FSBO method.
In the meanwhile we’ve visited a total of 16 houses of which 3 are very promising. And we’ve placed her house on the FSBO sites (including Khusan of course!) and shortly Funda will also take it up.