The agent clearly was unaware that buyers in the $1M and over price range won't see the listing when doing a search based on price.

This sort of cutesy pricing makes sense for the blue-light specials at KMart, but it's terribly stupid in real estate. Round it up to a million bucks and you reach everyone searching from $750 to $1M and everyone searching from $1M and up.

I think the Realtor who delivered the title line expected me to be mortally wounded by it, and be shamed into realizing the ignorance of my ways. In her view, the press has no reason for existing if it isn’t part of the sales team.

Setting the scene: I visit a $2,000,000 new construction open house in a north shore suburb of Chicago. I introduce myself, present a copy of our New Homes Magazine, outline our ambitious plans to build an audience of north shore home buyers and sellers for our YoChicago site, and request permission to take some interior photos to post on an open house tour.

In order that the Realtor will have no surprises when she visits our Web site, I mention that we’d posted a criticism on our site of the home’s exterior – that we’d suggested it was more appropriate for a downscale suburb than for the north shore.

Her reaction was simple and visceral: blind, cold fury. "You have no right to put a photo of this house on the Internet." Well, actually, ma’am, I do. This country has a little thing called a Constitution and it has a certain amendment that’s applicable to this situation. “You're not helping us to sell our house," was her next gambit. I didn’t realize I’d been hired to do that, ma’am.

"We’ll never advertise with you. Never," she continued. Well, ma’am, I’ve been in business quite a while without your support, and might be able to manage a bit longer without it. She then called the home's developer, outlined her view of the situation, and relayed the developer’s order for me to leave the house. So long, ma’am. It’s been good to know you.

This Realtor is typical of many – completely lacking understanding of the role of the press, of the rights of others and, more importantly, clueless about marketing.

She was being handed an opportunity to showcase the home’s attractive interior on a Web site that had criticized its exterior. She blew it.

She made it clear that she doesn't do her homework by looking at exactly what was said before reacting - any hint of criticism is pure evil, she indicated.

She’s closed her mind to advertising (not that she was ever asked to) on a site that has a lot of credibility and that’s building an audience. She’s likely to give bad advice about that site to a lot of sellers for a long time to come. She’s killed any chance she might have ever had of being recommended by someone who’s in touch with quite a few buyers and sellers.

Worst of all, she unwittingly placed a bet that I wouldn’t lay out her closed-minded approach and stupid aggression for everyone to read about on the Web. Suppose she’d been talking to someone who named names? Who knows how many sellers might Google her and stay away?

Draw your own lessons from this story. Here’s mine: the Web changes almost everything about how you need to approach buyers, sellers and visitors to open houses. Start learning the new rules and applying them as quickly as possible.

… the lazy, traditional, one-stop-shopping of TV upfront and the big-media lunch circuit is inefficient, wasteful, untargeted, irrelevant, and ultimately damned irritating to your customers.

The point is simple and almost always overlooked: if you want to reach customers, reach them the way they want to be reached.

Internet real estate shoppers find the experience immensely frustrating. Advertisers are making feeble efforts - if any - to make the experience more satisfying to home buyers and renters.

Buying advertising has been a lazy man's game until now. Put your ad in the major media if you want impact; put it in the local media to satisfy a client; buy cheap, be cynical about results.

Spending on traditional media is more and more wasteful. Using the Internet effectively, in today's world and tomorrow's, means investing a lot more effort in advertising. Few advertisers today are willing to invest the effort. Those that do will have a long-term sustainable advantage.

Read your ads out loud. Can you stand the way you sound?

Image from Gaping Void.

At the end of the day, a forced opt-in is about control.

Control over your business, your website and your future. The money is in your list of prospects that come from your blog, your website and IDX VOW websites.

Control is from you communicating your message to an opt in list. It comes from knowing the point of your real estate blog, or your realty website. In my opinion that is to gather names. Lots and lots of names. So that can talk with those names on your terms.

We’re afraid that he’s serious.

What real estate agents need to recognize is that control freaks are perceived by consumers as just that – freaks. No one wants to do business with a freak.

That's just one of the many not too surprising findings in the 2006 Realtor Technology Survey from the Center for Realtor Technology.

You'd think any industry with that low a consumer satisfaction rating would die quickly. Not likely. Most real estate agents are suckers for a quick fix to growing their business. And most real estate agents, despite all the evidence, think they'll be the exception to the prevailing rules.

So why is this finding not surprising? Any real estate agent who thinks of a person as a "lead" is doomed to fail. Leads are for losers.

The real estate industry needs to start blogging, according to this site, to avoid missing out on leads.

There's a very real possibility that an avalanche of junk blogs will make online real estate journals as useless for readers as agent Web sites have become.

Some of the survey data is reported and discussed in a good article by Bob Hunt at Realty Times.

Some key numbers: 64 percent of the buyers who used an agent and 74 percent of the sellers who used an agent interviewed only one agent. The most important factor in choosing a seller's agent was reputation. Among buyers, 92 percent ranked product and market knowledge as important.

Our take-away: use the Internet to develop a reputation by show-casing your product and market knowledge. Write about the market and the homes that are available rather than simply declaring that you're an expert.

I generally head for the door - or its Internet equivalent, my bookmarks – when I see a real estate agent going on about his integrity and saying he merits my trust.

How can a real estate agent demonstrate trustworthiness on the Internet in a way that doesn’t send people fleeing? It’s a question that takes on increasing importance all the time.

You’ll find some approaches to developing trust in an interview with Karen Stephenson, author of The Quantum Theory of Trust, at the HypergeneMediaBlog. A quote:

How do people learn to trust me? Well, because I write about things, I behave, I transact in certain ways that show I have integrity that I’m honorable, and I don’t take cheap shots, you know.

Things like that build a reputation. We can identify those criteria and institutionalize them - that would establish whether I’m trustworthy.

Every attempt on my part to talk about and show off the trends and technologies that are reshaping real estate marketing on the Web was met with blank stares, total indifference. and a complete lack of curiosity. I was talking to zombies, as I often find myself doing.

The day ended on a much more positive note, in a meeting with Bob Darrow, who's writing for YoChicago's West Lakeview / Roscoe Village journal.

Bob already has an impressive mastery of a wide set of Web tools. He's developed his skills despite the fact that, by his report, his sellers don't yet attach much value to them, in anticipation of the day when his skills will become the norm. He stopped in to see us to see whether we could help him improve the ways he's using our Wibiti and YoChicago journal Web-based marketing tools.

There's a strong irony in the fact that the ad agencies and media professionals who are supposed to be the leaders in real estate marketing lag well behind the real estate agents they should be leading.