Many agents include outside links in their sites to local city information. Far fewer agents take and include their own photos of city landmarks. And even fewer agents make themselves “tour leader,” including themselves in the foreground of photos showing city or area highpoints. It’s perplexing, because delivering community information is so powerful yet so easy and inexpensive, you’d think all agents would want to do it.

This, being a visual medium, is a hard subject to just “talk about,” so illustrations are in order. With a bit of searching, I located some excellent examples.

In my opinion, the following agents are great at presenting their community:

Judy Niemeyer, CRS, CSP, GRI, of Irvine Company Real Estate, Fairhope, Alabama, offers visitors an entertaining slide show of her home town.

Debbie Burton, Fred Sands Platinum Properties, Irvine, California uses a different approach. She takes advantage of free pages offered consumers by Geocities.com to link to and frame numerous aerial and landmark photos of Aliso Viejo, California. In addition, she provides several live videocams showing views of the city (and even a taped video of herself working at her desk.)

Lonnie Shapiro, ABR, CRS, GRI of Prudential Connecticut Realty, Ridgefield and Redding, CT, provides both photos and accompanying text about her city, followed by links to more detailed city information.

Roger Lautt, CRS, CRP, of Re/Max Exclusive Properties, 1618 N. Wells Street, Chicago, actually made himself taller than the tallest Chicago building to demonstrate how he is very much connected to the community. Ya gotta go and see how he did this.

Charissa Pemper of Re/Max Affiliates in the Greater Boston area, provides site information not only for Boston, but for all the suburbs, too. From a menu page she has created distinctive URLs that incorporate the name of the suburb city, thus making her pages come up better on search engines when people search for, say, “Brookline real estate,” , or perform similar word phrase searches for West Roxbury, or five other suburb cities.

Each main suburb page in Charissa’s stunning site takes a visitor to a generous description of the city’s past and present, plus provides further pages on schools, an RE snapshot of prices, the time homes are on the market, homes for sale, an MLS to search for homes, maps and local links.

It's an even stronger step towards having consumers identify you with your geographic marketplace involves putting yourself into scenes of the cities you serve.

Debbie Ferrari, e-PRO, C.E., did a nice job of using varied photos of herself near landmarks of San Juan Capistrano, CA, home of the famed mission of the same name. In addition, by actually putting herself into the foreground of city scenes of Aliso Viejo, CA a site visitor gets to know more about the city and the agent at the same time.

The message that buyers get in all we’ve discussed so far is, “This agent is an authority regarding this city and thus is a good choice to help me find a home there.”

Buyers who are using the Web to select an agent may well choose the one whom they think knows the area best. Who would argue with this statement: “Photos help people know more about a city they’ve not visited and people whom they’ve not yet met”? Thus, offering more and meaningful photos of your city, or better yet, ones showing you as tour guide, helps you be chosen more often by buyers who are checking out agents on the Web.

You’ve always suspected that if only consumers could get to know your scintillating personality, they would often choose you over other agents. Well, now’s your chance to test that theory. Show your personality by being the online “tour leader” for your city.

Do it well, and your visitors will start spending considerably more time in your site. Moreover, the longer they are there, the more likely it is that they may choose you as their agent.

Published: November 27, 2001

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Bill Koelzer is a Web marketing consultant to web-proficient agents nationwide. He is co-author, with Barbara Cox, Ph.D., of the Prentice-Hall books, Internet Marketing in Real Estate and Internet Marketing. Bill is also webmaster of Orange County Real Estate, among the most-awarded known Realtor® sites. Visit his website, Koelzer.com or e-mail him at .