According to the California Association of REALTORS™ benchmark annual Internet vs. Traditional Buyer Survey for 2007, 82 percent of first time homebuyers find their real estate agent online.

Mining for buyers and sellers and promoting your listings on the Internet has never been more important than it is now. According to the State of Real Estate Marketing 2007 report from Inman News:

• 63 percent of agents plan to use third party listings websites like Google Base, Oodle and Zillow to market their listings.
• 31 percent are using social networking sites (like MySpace, Facebook and Active Rain) to advertise their services right now.
• 47 percent of agents overall say they are increasing their marketing budget in the coming year. 58 percent of newer agents will spend more.

The agents who are most successful in leveraging listings promotion sites, social networks and content distribution to boost their business will be the ones who get help. The Inman report explains:

Fewer than 20% of the respondents said they employ an Internet marketing specialist, though that figure was slightly higher for brokers and broker/agents combined and slightly lower for agents and broker/agents combined. (Note: broker/agents are defined as the group of respondents who identified themselves as both brokers and agents.) Also, those who said they had more than 15 years’ experience in the business or closed more than 15 deals in 2006 were more likely to employ an Internet marketing specialist. Experience may bring the wisdom of hiring others to perform non-sales tasks while volume may generate the income to support the expense.

You sell. I market. There's no reason you should do both; buyers and sellers pay you to sell houses, not yourself. I work the Internet and free you to do what you get paid to do.

With your competition digging in to reap the rewards of Internet marketing, it's important that you consider your own Internet marketing plan. I make it easy, effective and painless.

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