Who's buying, who's selling?

LAS VEGAS -- The first rule of business is to know your market and in real estate that means paying attention to things like the annual survey of home buyers and sellers released by the National Association of Realtors this week. Some of the more interesting takeaways from this year's survey, which measured consumer habits from mid-2006 to mid-2007 (so before the deep credit crunch that unfolded over the summer), were:

--For-sale-by-owners, or FSBOs, were little changed at about 12 percent of the sellers surveyed.
--Forty-five percent of first-time home buyers bought with no money down.
--Ninety-percent of sellers who used an agent said their home was listed in the MLS. (Five percent said they didn't know whether their home was listed.)
--Nine percent of sellers using an agent went with a limited set of services, while an additional 9 percent said they used an MLS-listing-only service and the remaining 81 percent chose a full range of services.

Tons more nuggets from this year's survey, but that should give a taste.

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