How one agent closes almost all her listing presentations

"Lilo" Clacher is an agent with Crye-Leike Realtors in Cookeville, TN. She has been a realtor for 13 years: 11 in Florida and the last two in Tennessee. But it is only in the last two years that she has succeeded online. In 2008, 75% of her leads and 17 of her sales came from her website (www.lilorealtor.com). No doubt many agents would be very happy to have 17 sales closed in that terrible year, but it's how Lilo lands listings that literally blew us away when we spoke to her recently. How she does so illustrates an often-overlooked benefit of being a true Internet realtor: Success selling homes online attracts sellers because the public knows that 84% of all homes sales begin on the Internet.

Lilo has a simple presentation to show her Internet dominance

First, she tells clients of the importance of the Internet in selling property today. "Surprisingly," she says, "many clients already know that a strong Internet presence is necessary, but most have never seen it proven right in their living rooms. The first thing I do is ask them to enter 'Cookeville TN Real Estate' (or another of the towns I sell in) into their favorite search engine. Because I come up on page one of all of them, they immediately get the point that anyone looking for property in Cookeville online has a chance at coming to my website. Then, using my WebReporterTool, I show them statistics about my site and what it does for my clients. I show them how 4902 people found my site on the first pages of the major search engines in the last year. I show them that 50% of the visitors to my site come from search engines, meaning that we aren't limited to just the local marketplace when selling their home, but that people from all over look on my site. I open a chart that shows that while I had 9600 page views from Tennessee in recent months, that I had 8900 from Florida, 4100 from VA, 3900 from New York and even 2700 from California. They immediately understand that there is a whole large group of homebuyers on the Internet that would never find them without the services of an Internet realtor. And then, I pull out my secret weapon, and close the listing! Since I started this, I have won seven listings!"

Lilo's 'secret weapon'

Remember, she has just spent a few moments enthralling her prospects with evidence of her Internet strengths and attractiveness. With the stage thus set, she turns on her Statcaster feature on her tool, which shows -live, as it happens-every visitor to her site, where that visitor is from, and how many page views her site has had so far that day! Thus, the client's attention is seized by this little box on the bottom of her laptop and sure as shooting, while they watch, visitors come onto Lilo's site right in front of them! "It never fails to trigger a conversation about how I sold someone's home they know to a person from out of state," Lilo told me, "and that's when they are convinced to list their home with me."

"There's no question that my success online has a lot to do with my CompassSearch subscription. After all, before I subscribed I could get no higher than page 14 of Google. Once I subscribed I was on page one of Google within six weeks and sold my first home from my subscription seven weeks after I signed up. I never knew how useful this could be in gaining listings, however, and it is the most powerful tool I have ever seen for doing that!"

Caroline Wethington