New Jersey Realtor Sandy Duffy isn't a twenty-something computer geek - she's a Realtor with over 33 years experience. Just like other real estate professionals, she knew nothing about the Web and one day in 1998 decided to learn. Soon, she was closing over $4 million a year in sales from her Web site.

Is that the most any agent has ever done on the Web? Far from it, but what makes Duffy's story interesting is that she is living proof of what any good agent can do on the Web with a little investigation and commitment.

According to Duffy, she is getting 7,000 hits per month, and in January it went up to 10,000. Out of those, she gets about 10 bona fide inquiries a week, and these qualified leads are with no referral fees, no 1,000-piece mailings, no assistant, "although I think I could have done twice that if I’d taken the time to find one," laments Duffy. "All I did was just $67 per month maintenance and an annual renewal fee. You do the math.” How did she do it?

Duffy's secret Internet weapon is Best Image Marketing, a California-based company that provides “custom-template hybrid” web sites and a web marketing strategy for top-producing real estate agents and brokers. Duffy does nothing special, except she lets Best Image do all the work. The company does the site design, hosting, search engine placement, lead capture, lead tracking and more. Duffy answers the customer inquiries via e-mail.

“I was at the point where I thought I really needed to get my own Web site, because it was at the cutting edge of doing business,” she recalls. At the time, Duffy was situated with a major franchise brokerage, but wasn't content to let her company do her marketing for her. "They had just created a major company site, and they were touting how many people were coming to them. So I thought that rather than dilute the number of leads I would get by being part of an office web site – where it could be just a beauty contest or a chance encounter, I really should have a site that would draw people specifically to me,” she reasoned.

So Duffy did her homework. She took a couple of weeks to research web designers who specialized in real estate. She studied the existing agent sites in her market, and found most of them lacking. “Almost every one was nothing more than a billboard for the agent – a long brag sheet touting the agent’s position as ‘the top agent in my office’ – something that if I were looking for a house, I wouldn’t have spent more than 15 seconds on, because there wasn’t any meat to it.”

As a buyer’s agent specializing in relocation, Duffy tried to put herself in an out-of-town buyer’s shoes. She wanted information on her site that would give visitors from outside her market a feel for the Princeton area and some of the townships in Mercer and Middlesex Counties. Duffy has a "Check Out My Town" page on her site that lets visitors read information about all the towns in her market area.

“I went out and took a lot of pictures that I thought would convey the essence of what my area is like,” she says. “A lot of people come to New Jersey thinking it’s nothing but asphalt and smokestacks, and I wanted to make sure I imparted to them that there is beauty in central Jersey, and it can be just as nice as their hometown – wherever they’re from. I thought that a really good "Check Out My Town" page would be important to anyone relocating. "

Adds Duffy, "I’ve been to sites where the community information page is nothing more than links to school and government sites. I don’t think that sets you apart as an agent who knows the area. Anybody can make a list of links. I think people want to feel that you know your town, that you can show them what’s nice about the area, not just that you can point them to government sites.”

As a Best Image Web site customer, Duffy was automatically added to the company's NUMBER1EXPERT list, a group of 1,200 plus agents found at the company's Web site. This site is heavily promoted by Best Image marketers on Internet search engines, directories and in banner ads on such sites as Yahoo, Lycos and Look Smart . The banners read, “Looking for homes? Looking for info? Looking for advice? Find YOUR real estate expert…” By clicking on the banner, consumers are taken to NUMBER1EXPERT.com where they can ask a real estate-related question of an “expert” – whether they’re buying, selling or relocating.

While there are many great Web designers, it is much more difficult to find professionals who are willing to submit clients' sites to search engines, a point of difference for Best Image and for Duffy. Others want to collect monthly hosting fees but they don't want to be responsible for generating leads.

“People seem to find my site when they’re looking for a Realtor in the Princeton area, and they’re surfing to see who’s out there,” she says. “When I signed up, I hoped for the best, but I certainly checked out other agents’ sites. I would go into Dogpile.com, because it’s a multi-search site, and I would type in a town name and real estate – princeton real estate, for example – and see what came up. The Best Image site in that town almost always came up near the top of the list.”

Also important to Duffy are the lead capture forms such as "Are you relocating?" that entice consumers to answer inquiries and leave their e-mail addresses. "A lot of them really want to be anonymous for awhile. They want information,” Duffy explains. “I’ve found that if you provide the information they’re seeking, even if they’re not ready to make a move yet, they’ll come back to you. I recently got a call from a buyer who I last e-mailed nine or ten months ago. I’d given him the information he needed then, and now he’s ready to buy.”

Internet buyers are very different than local buyers, says Duffy, requiring her to learn how to deal effectively with them. Her first web site transaction – a $400,000 property she sold to a Manhattan couple moving their family business to the Princeton area – came just a few weeks after her site was online, and paid for the site’s creation and marketing for the entire first year. Since Duffy already knew how to e-mail pictures of listings to online buyers, she already knew the most important trick of the trade - give information right away.

Duffy also gets a hit report from Best Image. For the week of February 3, for example, she received 498 visitors, 93 entered via Yahoo, 65 through PrincetonOnLine (a local portal), 41 via Google, 34 from MSN, and so on. The most popular page on her site (based on clicks) was her Feature Homes (340 clicks), followed by Check Out My Town (93), Real Estate Library (89), Find Your Home! (56) and Homecaster (32). Each of these pages is designed to be a lead capture tool. The Real Estate Library, for instance, keeps people reading a series of 52 real estate-related articles the company writes for its experts, while Homecaster is a simple e-mail form that lets buyers sign up to receive an agent’s latest listings as soon as they’re added to the site.

Learning how to respond via email to people who fill in the blanks on the Find Your Home! or the Are You Relocating? page takes some training, Duffy says. Internet buyers can be scared off by pushy Realtors, she’s learned, and that traditional tactics of getting the appointment and getting buyers into the office won’t work with them. She uses a couple of templates in her e-mail responses, primarily for reasons of expediency. “One stock paragraph in my initial email response to a buyer states that it’s my policy to honor their online privacy, and I understand they may be in the information gathering stage, and I will not contact them again unless they want to ask me something else,” Duffy says.

How much time does working the leads take? Duffy spends one-and-a-half to two hours a day on average checking and responding to e-mails and interactive forms, usually very early in the morning or very late in the evening. She usually works from home, so this has become an easy routine. But she checks her e-mail several times a day at the office as well, even if it’s just to answer an inquiry with a quick note saying she’ll provide a more thorough response later.

Although Duffy is primarily a buyer’s agent, she also handles listings – and even puts them on the site herself. Her Feature Homes page is what the site designer calls Instant Listings, because all she has to do is enter a private page accessed with a username and password, and load a description of the new listing along with several photos and/or a virtual tour. The entire process takes about ten minutes, and she can do this using her digital camera and laptop computer right from the seller’s kitchen. This makes for a dramatic end to a listing presentation in which the seller’s home appears live on the Internet before Duffy walks out the door.

She’s recently added new software to her site, called Visual Tour, which lets her create and upload a home tour very quickly. “I got a new listing the other day, went out the next morning, took pictures, and had the visual tour on my site by noon,” she recalls. “By the end of the day, I had gotten two e-mails and three phone calls from the web site and the sign out front. When you present your site to sellers, and show them the kind of exposure you can give their house – not just one picture on a fax sheet, it’s very powerful.”

Duffy doesn't rest on her laurels. She actively promotes the site in her local market area, putting her site’s domain name everywhere, including business cards and sign riders. She’s also learned how to create extra links for even more traffic. “I’m no techno-geek, but I spend a fair amount of time surfing to see what sites I can join to create a link to mine,” she says. “There are many free sites to which you can submit your URL, and I do that all the time.” One local site, Princeton Online, charges a nominal annual fee, but pays off handsomely with a significant number of clicks into Duffy’s site weekly.

She has also purchased a Realtor.com I-LEAD Web site, to create a link to her Number1expert site. “I wasn’t looking for Realtor.com to actually generate business for me,” she explains. “I just needed the link to drive people to my site rather than have them bounce to the next agent. Realtor.com has something in the neighborhood of 124 agents in Princeton alone, so the chance of your name coming up at the top in their random shuffle – alphabetically by first name – is one in 124. Just in case someone finds my listing, they’ll be sent directly to my personal site and not to a Realtor.com home page.”

She knows that buyers go to Realtor.com and other huge listing sites to get an idea of housing prices in any community, but once there, they still need to connect with an agent. “They still need a warm body to talk to, to help them sort things out,” she says. “By having one-to-one contact with me, they get a better picture of the housing situation. I’ve sold houses to people from Japan who were being relocated and found my site. Because my site reaches people across the country, across the world, I can really be of service to people who want to know what things are like in Princeton.”

Other benefits are that her web sites have allowed her to eliminate the direct mail pieces she used to send out, as well as much of her advertising in newspapers and homes magazines, simply because the return-on-investment.

“Most newspaper advertising is to appease sellers," says Duffy. "They want to know you’re advertising their house, yet we all know from statistics that very few people buy a house because they saw it advertised in print. It’s just a way of making contact with the Realtor or the agency. With my web site, I’m short-circuiting that route by having people come directly to me instead of coming to my agency.”

“Too many agents spend the minimal amount of money and tell themselves, ‘I’ve got a web site,’ and they don’t have a clue how to make it come up in the search engines or how to make the site pay off,” Duffy cautions. “They’re throwing their money in the wind. Certainly most agents in my community who have a web site are getting no business from it. If you do a search, you can see why. It’s because they don’t have anything of value on the site.”

"I have been dreading the day when every agent has a dyn-o-mite web site, works it by the minute, and dilutes my web presence and web business to a trickle," says Duffy. "But I say "Viva the ostriches!" Long may they keep their heads in the sand!”

Published: March 9, 2001

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