Fortune Small Business recently reported that the FSBO market was shrinking. It cited as its source for this information data from RealTrends. RealTrend’s Steve Murray says that from 2006 til now FSBO sellers have dropped from 20% of the market to 15%. The article also uses the anecdote of David Zwiefelhofer, who designs FSBO Web sites and sells them to real estate entrepreneurs. According to Zwiefelhofer: “I used to get a phone call a day from people interested in FSBO Web sites,” Zwiefelhofer says. “Now it’s maybe one call a week.”

The number that’s really harder to get at, and probably would give a better indication of the growth of the FSBO market, is how many hybrid FSBO, or flat-fee MLS listing sellers there are. Seller’s who utilize MLS Entry Only brokers often consider themselves to be ‘for sale by owners’ and, in many regards, rightly so. After all, these sellers are really performing all of the tasks that a real estate agent would normally perform with the exception of placing the property into the Realtor® Multiple Listing Service.

If you take the National Association of Realtors® figure of 11% of the market belonging to MLS Entry Only companies and add it to Murray’s 15% and you’ve now got over a quarter of the market selling for sale by owner.