The word farm conjures up visions of fields of waving wheat, chickens clucking in the yard, the sturdy farmer rising before dawn to milk the cows in the old red barn.

To a real estate agent, however, farm has only a passing, syntactical relationship to agriculture.

When an agent or broker "farms" an area, he or she tries to guarantee that, when people sell or buy houses, they go no farther than the agent's door.

To farm means to focus on a particular geographical area, or even on just a particular kind of home, such as condos.

The agents who farm say if you don't continually farm, you'll lose the farm.

If you are good at farming, you can develop such an intimate knowledge of each property that you can show it to clients without needing a cheat sheet.

Another key to success of agents who farm is maintaining constant contact with clients, even if it means 100 phone calls a day.

While some busy agents get five to eight real leads a day through the Internet, the telephone often remains the most important tool of the industry.

Real estate is the biggest financial transaction most people make in their lives, and they want to hear from a real person as much as possible.

In that way, real estate fits into the basics of selling anything:

First, the customer buys you, then your company, then your product.

If you are contacted at the outset by e-mail, these people expect you to contact them by e-mail. But in the return e-mail, you should suggest that the person then contact you by phone.

One agent compares his way of doing business to that of a cardiologist: If you are having chest pains and call the cardiologist, do you expect him to e-mail you instead?

Probably not. But there is no argument that the Internet and e-mail have made farming easier, or at least somewhat more efficient for agents and brokers who don't have a photographic memory.

Some successful agents blend farming with the Internet, coming up with what they call e-farming. What this means is that they tend a low-cost website designed for the neighborhood or neighborhoods in which they sell houses.

These websites are a potpourri of services, suggestions, news you can use, and private message boards for residents of the neighborhoods that make up the farm.

One of the reasons many agents go to listing presentations with a laptop is to try to paint a visual picture of what they do and how they will sell the house.

E-farming is an inexpensive way to increase your visibility in the area you farm, and will create the belief in the people living there that you are a neighborhood specialist, the agents who e-farm say.

Best of all, a website is something people can't throw away easily.

Real estate agents make use of a lot of self-promotional items to get their names across to our markets. Among them are postcards, which tend to last three seconds from the mailbox to the trash can.

Still, just putting up a website and waiting for people to visit isn't the right way to farm the Internet, either.

If you don't get their name or phone number, if they just remain anonymous visitors to your website, what's the point of the exercise? It's like people coming through a Sunday open house, commenting about how much they liked the house, and then saying good-bye without telling you who they are.

Despite the obvious advantages of technology, many real estate agents will continue to do business the traditional way.

In a 2001 survey by the National Association of Realtors, only 15 percent of all real estate companies responding to the survey said they had closed some part of their transactions online, and 88 percent of all agents and brokers were using the Internet and e-mail for less than one-quarter of their business.

Even fewer agents were generating leads from the Internet.

Although that percentage of Internet-dependent agents has increased over the last couple of years as the housing market has exploded and several hundred thousand more Realtors have been added to the fold, 99 percent of the technology available still never gets used, according to one savvy agent.

You just pick one or two things, and master them.

Published: July 1, 2004

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Al Heavens writes about real estate and home repair and improvement. He is the author of What No One Ever Tells You About Renovating Your Home: Real-Life Advice For Hassle-free, Cost-Effective Remodeling.