“I’m selling my house… Please share. If your share leads to the completed sale, I’ll pay you $1000!!!”
That’s the caption in Lori Ralph’s recent Facebook post, which includes an accompanying link to a Kijiji page that showcases her family’s $589,000 home.
Forgoing a realtor, the family has turned to Facebook to sell their Portugal Cove-St Philip’s., NFLD four-bedroom, four-bathroom home, offering a $1,000 prize for the share that leads to a sale. Just a week after Ralph shared the post, her sales pitch had been shared 5,200 times through the social network (mostly by complete strangers), and she’s had 9,775 hits on Kijiji (and counting).
I feel that this has spun a bit out of control. I was just exploring this as an option for selling my home. I am not…
Posted by Lori Chafe-Ralph on Tuesday, December 8, 2015
With that type of exposure, Ralph says she doesn’t need to use a realtor, according to CBC. She estimates that the elimination of a realtor will save $30,000 on the sale of the two-story, 4,200 square-foot home.
“It also gives you the opportunity to give the buyer a better price because you don’t have to pay a realtor all that money,” said Ralph to On the Go, according to CBC. If the house doesn’t sell by spring, however, she will hire a real estate agent (she stresses in an updated post that she is not opposed to real estate agents).
Judging from its exposure so far, she likely won’t have to, offering another example of how social media increasingly leaves no sector untouched in its elimination of the need for old-fashioned physical human interactions. It will be interesting to see the effects of social media on the housing market, and whether this trend catches on.
Until then, if you’re in the market for a family home in Newfoundland – or know someone who is – and are in need of a little extra holiday cash, you may want to check it out for yourself.
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