In case you never got one, here’s what a buyer inquiry can look like:

Dear (Agentname): I’m opening a new company branch office and we must move our whole family in (month) to the Dana Point coastal area. We have 4 elementary school kids and need at least a 4-bedroom, 3-bath, minimum 2,000 sq. ft home, ideally in a gated neighborhood with ocean view and in a golf course community from $450,000 to $550,000. Please let me know what’s available and where I might look for homes there over the Internet.

Yikes! What do you do now? Here are some tips:

• Answer promptly. If you don’t, the buyer will contact another agent who will. So check your e-mail 2-3 times daily and answer within 4-5 hours.
• Know what the buyer wants by "listening" for clues and ways to serve him/her, just as you would in person. From the words the buyer above used, you can deduce that s/he likely has the following concerns: Relocation, moving, commercial office property, storage, local city information, utilities, taxes, school quality, security/privacy, golf courses, web sites that offer consumer MLS searching.
• Start by making yourself a list of the concerns that you identified. Then, refer to this list as you write your reply. It should be a succession of paragraphs citing local conditions as they apply to each concern that the person expressed.
• At the end of each paragraph, include a web site address that enables the buyer to go get even more information about that topic. For example, for city information, you could send: http://www.focusoc.com/cities/ and http://www.danapoint-ca.com. For relocation, send: http://www.virtualrelocation.com/. For golf, send, http://ocnow.com/recreation/onthegreens/guide/ or http://www.focusoc.com/town/golf.html. And for schools, send them to: http://www.theschoolreport.com.

For MLS searching, send them to http://www.homeseekers.com/oc/, http://www.Realtor.com, or http://www.homeadvisor.com, or any large search site with which you have an affiliation. Or, send your client to your Realty chain’s corporate site, which often blocks out names of listing agents and/or agents who are not part of your firm.

How do you find sites relevant to the buyer’s concerns? On a search engine you search for them using key words. Then you copy the sites’ URLs (web site addresses) and paste them into the e-mail you’re writing to the buyer. (When you search for golf courses, you might use key search words like: golf courses, your county, your state)

You get the point. Rather than just answering back saying you’ll be happy to help the family, why not offer real tools that perfectly serve the buyer’s immediate wants and needs? After all, most web-savvy buyers already hunt for homes over the web before getting an agent to handle the final in-neighborhood search. So, if you help buyers do more of that independent research that they like, they will like you more.

• Don’t be afraid to e-mail a buyer back and ask for more specifics "so I can better pin-point exactly the kind of home you want."

Remember, to the Internet-savvy buyer you are just a photo on your web site and the words in your e-mail messages. S/he cares little about the number of acronyms you have after your name or how many sales trophies you’ve won. So never highlight that stuff.

S/he does care that you listen to him and show an almost uncanny fathoming of his wants and needs. If you can do that, s/he’ll stick with you all the way through a successful escrow.

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