Marketing and advertising property has come a long way since agents use to take photos of properties and then they needed to get them developed ..... actually, I DON'T know how they did it.

These days you can advertise 100's of properties in the property publications (if you have the budget) and 1000's of properties on websites. Web development has also come a long way to assist "surfers" (no, not the tall, dark & bleached hair kind) in finding exactly what they are looking for, in the area of their choice and something that fits into the budget, a nice big garage for dad a modern kitchen and oh yes, a cupboard just for moms shoes.

Websites have widened the agents scope to buyers from other countries, being able to look at virtual tours of the property inside and with Google Street view you can now even have a look at the houses around you and see if the property is in good company or not .... now you can contact the agent who makes the appointment, shows you some of the details that are hidden from the net and the camera and there you go, before you know it the offer is signed and the rest as they say ......

In addition to the web, agents have realised that there are many ways of getting more traffic to your own stock on the website so, enter the dreaded SOCIAL NETWORKING sites and portals. See, the nice thing about facebook is that YOU can decide who YOU want to follow, have and invite as fiends so that when Mr "X" asks you on a date 5mins after accepting your friend request you can tell him to go and f ..... oh no, you just "BLOCK" or "UN FRIEND" or "UN FOLLOW" or whatever his ass and if you like you can report him to the facebook police.

Most of these social networking tools work on the same bases where you have people accepting you as a friend and they can then follow and or comment on what you have to say.  You can even decide if you want return comments or not. More and more business are using facebook and twitter to reach their "fast fingered" target markets so why not for us, the agents. 

These days, more than ever we need to be available and one way to do that is to be active, to facebook, to tweet and to blog.