BankMarketplace.com: FS Vendor’s Product of the Week

Please give a short bio of your company

BankMarketplace.com is a website that connects buyers and investors searching for bank owned property to banks and credit unions needing to sell their bank owned property.

What is your product or service?

BankMarketplace.com caters to two distinct groups, buyers and sellers of bank owned property. Buyers enjoy free searches and information. Banks and credit unions are able to choose listing packages to list their bank owned property. The premium listing service provides banks and credit unions with the option to have BankMarketplace.com take pictures, videos and upload information on to the site for them.

Please give a brief synopsis of the product/service

Searching the site for bank owned property is a free service that requires no membership, fees or required information, it is truly a free site for buyers and investors in bank owned property. Banks and credit unions can select from three listing packages with the main difference being the number of listings. They can even choose the “Three for Free” listing package if they want to try it out. In addition, a bank or credit union can subscribe to the Premium Listing Service that provides banks and credit unions with the option to have BankMarketplace.com take pictures, videos and upload the information on to the site.

Why would a bank or credit union use your product/service?

Banks and credit unions are not in the business of owning, marketing and selling bank owned property. It is very expensive to hold, maintain, market and sell these properties. Therefore, a bank or credit union must do everything possible to sell these properties, including letting buyers and investors know about the properties they have for sale.

How could you effectively use this product/service?

The best and most efficient way for a bank or credit union to use the website would be to select a listing package that would allow them to list all of their properties, choose the Premium Listing Service to provide the best chance of a search engine to locate the listing and to provide a link on the bank or credit union website that will direct interested buyers and investors to their bank owned property on BankMarketplace.com, all in one place. Users even have the ability to see how many times each listing has been viewed in total, by the month, week or day.

Who is your competition, and what do you do better?

We are unaware of any current competition to the website, their are many similar websites that either charge a membership fee, charge a fee to get contact information or list properties using public records which are often stale, have incorrect information or are not available because they are in the middle of a foreclosure action. All properties on BankMarketplace.com are owned by the bank and can be purchased directly from the bank with a clean title.

Are there different pricing levels? Do you offer a free version?

BankMarketplace.com has three listing package levels available, 3 for free, basic, and premium. Three for free is exactly what it sounds like, you get three free listings to try out the website or if you only have a few bank owned properties. The basic listing package allows up to 20 listings at one time and the premium listing package allows up to 100 listings. The basic and premium packages also allow the user to subscribe to the premium listing service.

When was the product/service officially launched?

BankMarketplace.com is a relatively new concept and the site was launched on January 1, 2012. Some of the products and services have changed and improved since the original launch of the site.

What is the number of current users? Estimated yearly growth?

The website is relatively new and the site has 10 registered banks using the site. Total registered users on the site are 102 including those registered for the free Marketplace Club. Recent changes including the 3 for free are projected to increase the number of registered bank and credit unions to over 100 by the end of 2012.

What type of help support is offered?

The website offers two options for support, the first is a toll-free number that is answered during business hours and the second is a contact us forum for which all messages are responded to the same business day, if not immediately.

What else is interesting about your product/service?

One of the biggest challenges for any website is showing up on Google searches, especially on the first page. With the addition of Youtube videos and meta tags on the listings, BankMarketplace.com listings have been showing up more often on Google searches and many times on the first page. This is a strategic goal for the company and is constantly being enhanced. To date, the site has had over 550,000 hits, and many of those have come from search engines like Google and Bing.