Since REALTORS® will have a tough time marketing themselves alone on the international Internet, they will be better off piggy-backing on the traffic generated by many of the top portals. The advantage is that many of these can also increase your exposure at the local level, and real estate is, after all, a local event.

All portals are not created equal, however, so the individual agent can't count on using the same strategy with each one. Every portal has a unique business model, so agents have to learn to work within those guidelines.

A good rule of thumb to follow is that the more listings a Web site has, the less likely they are to court the individual Realtor for free.

When dealing with the real Internet players, you can count on being sold something - a Web site or an ad, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. At least on the Internet, you can track your advertising budget, and yes, Web sites are definitely in the advertising category. Rest assured, however, that the top agents on the Internet, according to a trainer Allen F. Hainge, have at least four Web sites apiece, and many budget as much as 20 percent to 30 percent of their annual income for the Internet. And that's separate from newspaper advertising.

Homestore and Realtor.com

Homestore is the Internet's most trafficked portal for homes, driven largely by the success of Realtor.com. It contains several sister companies and strategic partners which all relate to home buying, renting, or selling, including Homebuilder.com (new homes) and Springstreet.com(apartments.)

Part of Homestore's business model, in addition to selling advertising and sharing revenues with strategic partners is predicated on providing services to a captive customer base of potentially over one million people. Those people are Realtors.

It is important to remember, as one Realtor put it, that Realtors don't pay dues to Realtor.com. They pay dues to the NAR. The NAR owns a minority interest in Homestore, but Homestore is a web site run for profit. Therefore, Realtors must pay in order to benefit from the record-breaking traffic numbers (120 million page views per month) that Realtor.com is able to generate.

Among the Realtor.com services to Realtors is the iLEAD Agent, a basic 3-page Web site. Additional pages and other upgrades cost more. This is essentially a template-type web site, but the real advantage is that once you become an iLEAD agent, your photo, links and contact information will be included in the Realtor.com marketing of any of your listings. Since Realtor.com has the most listings of any Web site, that is where many consumers will go to view listings.

Many Realtors are surprised when they first view their listings on Realtor.com. Even if their own MLS includes their photo, name and phone number, Realtor.com does not automatically do the same. Remember, Realtor.com gets its listing content from the MLS, not from the broker or the agent. Your listing on Realtor.com includes your broker's contact information, but not yours. You must pay to have yours included.

Is this a raw deal? Not necessarily. If you want the go-to site for consumers to be Realtor-friendly, then it's best to play along and become an iLEAD agent. It's a good affordable web presence, and for those with no other Web site or email, it gives you an easy-to-market and to-remember address for clients to find you - yourname@realtor.com. If you are a transactional, dual or single seller's agent, you need to be contacted by the consumer at the listing in order to get "both sides." It's also important to get a position in the front page directory of Realtor.com, called Find a REALTORŪ. Only iLEAD agent customers are listed in these "Yellow Pages." In addition, positioning with an iLEAD account means you will also have a presence on Homestore's partner sites, such as AOL, the Internet's busiest portal and ISP.

MSN HomeAdvisor/HomeSeekers

MSN HomeAdvisor and HomeSeekers are strategic partners which is why they are listed together in this piece.

MSN HomeAdvisor is the real estate portal driven by the one of the Internet's largest ISP's and search engines, not to mention that it benefits from the marquee power of the world's most prolific software vendor. MSN.com, Microsoft's portal site, has seen its traffic increase threefold in the past year with 37.7 million unique visits. When interested in real estate, these visitors are defaulted to HomeAdvisor.

Although HomeAdvisor's pedigree does not include a real estate affiliate or investor, it has proven itself to be as Realtor-friendly as it possibly can be by offering free leads back to listing agents from its listings.

HomeSeekers is not only a listings portal like Realtor.com and HomeAdvisor, it is also a leading provider of Web site services, making it a natural for adding Realtors to its list of Web customers. Web site development and management is this company's specialty, and they count among their clients no less than The Trump Companies. HomeSeekers provides listing management services to HomeAdvisor and they also share some content and revenues.

Facing fierce competition from Realtor.com and its exclusive Gold Alliance program which precludes participating MLSs from sharing listings with other national services, both HomeSeekers and HomeAdvisor have suffered setbacks in the listings wars. In order to get listings, the black gold of real estate sites, both HomeSeekers and HomeAdvisor have had to apply new strategies, some of which are of enormous benefit to Realtors.

HomeSeekers offers free template Web sites to all Realtors. Upgrades cost money, but are competitively priced with Realtor.com's. The Realtor can pick and choose how much s/he wants to spend and which upgrades are of the most value. When an agent registers with HomeSeekers, the agent's contact information is automatically added to each of his/her listings.

For those brokers and agents who are members of Gold Alliance-aligned MLSs, and who would like their listings to be featured on HomeAdvisor, the company provides a service called Broker Direct in which the broker or agent can input their own listings. Broker Direct allows the broker to bypass the Gold Alliance agreement without causing penalty to the MLS, the broker, or the agent, because the Gold Alliance agreement is with the MLS, not with the broker.

HomeSeekers and HomeAdvisor provide a means wherein the listings, with the broker's permission, can be posted on both sites.

Another advantage to signing up for a home page with HomeSeekers is that agents who do so will be included in the "Find an Agent" directory, featured prominently on the front page of HomeSeekers. The front page of HomeAdvisor features no directory for agents.

AOL

According to the latest data from Media Metrix, AOL has a strong lead among Internet portals, with more than 53 million unique users every month. It is the world's most popular ISP with almost 20 million subscribers. How did it grow so large?

To sell more computers, many manufacturers license office suites, anti-virus software, games and more to be installed on their systems at the factory level. Consumers can choose their new hardware based on the selection of software titles. AOL comes already installed on many computers sold throughout the United States. It offers the broadest categories of interest and range of services of any ISP. The interesting thing is that AOL doesn't operate like other ISPs or portals.

AOL is really it's own fiefdom. You think when you fire up your AOL software that you are automatically on the Internet, but you aren't until you click on the Internet. All those glorious features, chat rooms, advertising, classifieds, stories, personalized listings, email and more rest on the massive AOL servers. Others who do not have an AOL account can access AOL from the Internet, but it is an extra step for them. You are already there as soon as you fire up your machine, the closest think to being on an ISP intranet, only its public.

AOL is almost a perfect world and that's what makes it so important to anyone marketing services. AOL users really never have to leave the site, and they still have the highest level online (or AOL server) experience. It has everything, making it a true portal. E-mail accounts include up to seven addresses, great for families or small offices and offers easy to send pictures, great for sending home information to buyers. The only problem is that every time you send an email, you are advertising for AOL, not yourself.

The majority of Realtors use AOL. That would be fine, except the proprietary nature of AOL systems sometimes means that you don't receive email from other services, nor is the email you send, according to file size, delivered. That's not a good thing if you are using email for business. For that reason, AOL is best used for family entertainment and not for business.

So how can you have your AOL and run a business, too? According to tech guru, Stephen Canale you need an ISP. Use it for a speedier access to AOL and at half the rates. Here are Stephen's tips:

1. Click the "Set-Up" button in the AOL opening screen (before logging on) and you will find the option of accessing AOL via ISP - also referred to as TCP/IP.
2. Once you've selected the option to access AOL via the Internet (your ISP) you simply log on to the Internet BEFORE signing on to AOL. Rather than using it's own dialer, AOL will simply use the connection you've already established. To say that this is a much faster way of signing on, and using AOL, is an understatement of great proportions!
3. The next step to take is to change your account preferences so that you can pay less for your AOL service! Just go to "member services," then "accounts & billing" and select the BYOA (Bring Your Own Access) and you will slice your monthly bill from the $21.95 that most users are paying to just $9.95 a month!

Canale calls this turbo-charging your AOL. "Of course, if your ISP is charging you more than the $12.00 each month, then your net cost may increase slightly. But, trust me, for business quality access to the Web and email, it's well worth it," he says.

Now, how do you advertise your services as an agent on AOL? Well, they don't make it easy, and they aren't alone. You won't find published advertising pricing on any of the large portals.

If you have an iLEAD agent agreement with Realtor.com, you will automatically have a presence on AOL. If not, click on "real estate" and then "directories." You will find only 31 real estate agents listed as of 12-27-99. These are agents who have purchased ads on AOL.

To find pricing, you have to fill out an online form and then a sales representative calls you. You can't find out the pricing otherwise. This is designed to keep nuisance emails and calls down, but there's also something to be said for up front pricing which means equal opportunity.

Yahoo!

Yahoo! is second to AOL in traffic with a little more than 40 million unique visits, according to Forrester Research. Like AOL, there is an opportunity to advertise listings in the free classifieds section. You can even get a free email account, which will include some advertising every time you email someone, but that's the price of free these days.

Yahoo! was the first large search engine and portal to understand the importance of the local market. While still concentrating on national and international services including availability in several nations and languages, Yahoo! also makes searching at the local level not only viable but practical.

Real estate is, after all, a local event. When you key http://www.yahoo.com into your browser, the front page will offer a wide range of topics. Look for classifieds if you want to place a home for sale. You will have to go through a sign-up, designed to offer you services, which are actually a means of counting eyeballs for the service developers and advertisers, and that's okay. By being able to count eyeballs, the site should continue to improve its service delivery to the point that it is an exact science, which is inherently what makes the Internet more interesting than any other form of media.

Advertising yourself on Yahoo! is only slightly easier than it is with AOL. Getting prices is a matter of signing in and asking for information, and you'll be directed to the sales agent closest to you, or you'll be redirected to sign up on the Net.

To see where you can place a link to your own site, scroll down to " Yahoo! Get local," and click over to your state and community. The next page you see is a menu. Click Real Estate, and you will see all the competitors who have been siphoning off Yahoo! buyers and sellers off the Net. You can also get there by clicking Real Estate further back in the search, but you would have to know to look up Real Estate under Business and Economy on the front page. I'm not entirely confident that home buyers and sellers would get to you as easily from that heading as they would from Get local.

There are numerous other portals and real estate sites, but these are the biggest and the most influential. If 90 percent of sales is done by 10 percent of real estate professionals, the same is true for these Internet players where you will definitely want to have a Web presence of some kind.

See Part I of this two part series: