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            According to a 2006-07 National Association of Realtors’ survey, the majority (eighty-one percent) of all home sales today are captured by those companies who have establishing an effective presence on the Internet. The average home buyer will search for eight weeks and preview at least nine homes before purchasing their next home. Of those home buyers who use the Internet to help them find their home, eighty-one percent will purchase the home through a dealer. After using the Internet to locate available homes for sale, seventy-four percent will drive by those homes. Sixty-two percent will actually walk through the homes.

           Forty-nine percent of home buyers have previously owned a home and thirty-eight percent are renters. These buyers rely on the dealer eighty-five percent of the time and the Internet eighty percent of the time for information about the home they are interested in. Thirty-six percent of buyers found their new home through a dealer while twenty-four percent found their new home on the Internet. Fifty-four percent of buyers rely on the dealer to help them find the right home.

           Many companies, recognizing the need to be on the Internet, have spent thousands of dollars and many years trying to build an effective Internet presence only to discover that, while the website may look nice, it lacks the behind-the-scene engineering required to actually drive traffic to the site. Others, forced to subscribe to huge national listing services, find themselves getting lost in the crowd that doesn’t focus on their localized market. And still others, intimidated by the Internet, simpley fell behind and became victims of the “Great digital divide” (those who do the Internet and those who don’t). Some companies are still sadly trying to lure customers through costly newspaper ads and OPEN HOUSES where only five and three percent, respectively, of buyers find their new home. More and more companies are tragically closing their doors.

          Fortunately, the California Multiple Listing (“CML”), the “Premier Multiple Listing Service for Manufactured Housing in California” is here to serve the under-served manufactured housing market. By subscribing to the CML, any size company can quickly deploy and establish an effective presence on the Internet and begin to reach the eighty-one percent of home buyers they have been missing. For information about the CML, email: info@calmultiple.com.