According to statistics gleaned from the NAR's "2002 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers," online marketing could yield greater results than it has in the past. Not only do more homebuyers use the Internet, more choose to work with a Realtor after having visited the Internet. The trick is being the Realtor they find.

Sixty-two percent of buyers with Web access used the Internet to shop for a home. When you couple that statistic with others, Internet marketing becomes even more compelling:

• Seventy percent of all homebuyers choose to work with an agent
• Seventy-seven percent of online homebuyers choose to work with an agent, compared to 64 percent of traditional homebuyers.
• A whopping 73 percent of homebuyers choose to work with the first agent they interview, according to the NAR, and the remain with the agent throughout the home search. So if you are the first agent the buyer finds, you are most likely to get the buyer to closing.

That's why being found on as many channels on the Internet is more important to online agents than ever.

Traditional marketing online until now has been all about listings - with good reason. According to NAR, 90 percent of Internet homebuyers looked for listings, sustaining the popularity of national listings sites such as Realtor.com (66 percent,) HomeSeekers.com (10 percent) and MSN HomeAdvisor (7 percent.) which were built on the concept of aggregated listings.

Agents with listings benefit from marketing on listings sites, but only if they have current multiple listings and in multiple price ranges. Without that kind of inventory, listing agents can't be found easily, as they are only found in the prices of listings they have. If they are temporarily sold out of listings, or if they are buyer's agents, or they have listings in limited ranges or in ranges they don't normally sell, they won't be found.

That's one of many reasons to cause the real estate industry to ponder lead generation and how it should be done on the Internet. Another reason is profitability.

Real estate listings sites are already curbing their reliance on listings as a business model to attract agents. Sites including Realtor.com and Homeseekers have cut back drastically on paying MLSs for aggregated listings. Having all based their business plans on providing leads to agents, listings sites are looking at other ways for agents to be found and contacted by consumers on their vastly visited Web sites.

That means there's an open mind for new ideas in online marketing, and NAR statistics tell us exactly where to go to create lead generation opportunities for agents.

According to the NAR, 35 percent of online buyers also looked for "information about the area" - the next largest category behind listings. Fifty percent of buyers found "neighborhood and community information" extremely valuable, again the next largest category after listings and listings features such as photos, home addresses, and maps. School reports and crime data didn't even make the NAR's list, but agent contact information did - 40 percent of buyers found agent contact information extremely valuable.

What's missing in the whole online marketing strategy is the thing that can't be automated - what's happening in the local market. That's the one piece of information that can't be automated by any listings site. Only working agents and brokers know what's happening in their local market places.

After watching and reporting on the dysfunction of online marketing for agents for almost five years, Realty Times has created a solution for all concerned - the agents, brokers, the listings sites, and the MLSs, through its Market Conditions Reports.

Agents and brokers make reports on local market conditions - the one piece of information that consumers can't get anywhere - unless they talk to an agent who lives and works in that area.

To get the reports found by consumers, Realty Times has engineered an unprecedented dynamic distribution channel through the Internet's most popular homebuying portals - Realtor.com, MSN HomeAdvisor, HomeSeekers, Lycos Real Estate, and numerous MLS public Web sites and newspaper sites.

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"The industry's notions of what works in online lead generation is changing," says Jody Lane, president of Realty Times. "Brokers and agents are realizing that getting found on the Internet isn't easy unless consumers are being driven to their sites by other advertising means. Buyers who start their search online are the ones everyone wants to capture because the cost of customer acquisition is significantly lower."

"We've created a product that puts local agents in the news and advice sections of the greatest real estate portals on the Internet," explains Lane. "This is an unprecedented achievement and one that is likely to change the face of online marketing for the real estate industry."