Gebruik van eBay i.p.v. een makelaar

Dan heb je pas lef... Je huis te koop aanbieden vanaf $0.99. op eBay.com ging het huis weg voor $1.2 miljoen! Talk about home buyers bidding over the asking price. The winning bid for a San Mateo home with an initial asking price of 99 cents was $1.2 million.

That's because the waterfront home was auctioned off on eBay by Dan Whaley, a Web enthusiast who founded the first Web-based travel agency. During the 10-day bidding period — the maximum allowed on eBay — which ended Wednesday, the 1,650-square-foot home received

152 bids, according to eBay.

"I think this was an experiment," said Whaley, whose 1994 online experiment, the TravelNetworkstartup, earned him hundreds of millions of dollars.

"I wanted to see if I could get a sale done in a short amount of time and use the online approach. I like to do creative things, and I'm a bit of a control freak," Whaley said.

The three-bedroom house sits on a lagoon and includes a koi pond, tiled pool, dock with hydraulic boat lift and Moroccan-style architecture.

"It's no ordinary house in the suburbs," Whaley said.

More trusting of the open nature of online auctions than the traditional real estate sales approach, Whaley decided to sell the house himself.

"I didn't think the agents I talked to were really going to go to bat for me."

In retrospect, Whaley said, the $1.2 million