Two days ago, I closed escrow on a home in Ventana Lakes. The buyers were moving here from Michigan and had found me through my Westbrook Village Real Estate site.  That was May 12.

Two weeks after first contact they arrived in town and I showed them about a dozen different homes in Westbrook Village and, eventually, Ventana Lakes. The call of the water won out over the view of the fairway and the buyers put an offer on a beautiful home along the lake in Ventana’s newer phase. That was May 28.

Loan docs were signed and I handed them the keys on Tuesday. That was June 26.

Total elapsed time from first contact to closing: 45 days.

Shortly after giving my clients the keys to their new home, I received an e-mail from someone looking to sell his investment property near the new Westgate City Center in Glendale. This homeowner first had contacted me just over a year ago through my Dalton’s Arizona Homes site asking for automated listings that could help him keep an eye on the Executive Palms subdivision.

I sent him the market analysis this morning an expect to have the home listed and on the market within the next few days.

These are but two of the web leads I’ve received, but they help to illustrate the great grab-bag that is internet prospecting. Most real estate agents when they first start their site are looking for results along the lines of the first prospect when, in reality, most leads follow a far longer timeframe.

Instant gratification is the name of the game, but it’s also a game plan doomed to fail.

Last year I taught a series of classes inside Century 21 Arizona Foothills on building your web presence. Of the couple dozen people who attended the class, exactly one walked out the door and started a website to begin prospecting. The rest still are mulling it over, many months and many lost leads later.

Roughly half of my closings this year came from web leads (and nearly the entire other half were corporate relocations.) The same goes for my current listings. I long ago surrendered the farming postcards as their effective waned (and Tobey started to object to being dressed like a buffoon.)

It’s not that most agents lack the interest in building their business online. Rather, they lack either the time, energy or stubbornness necessary.

And this goes double for the real estate blogging world, where the multitudes have flocked without the slightest clue why. Better to set up a basic web site than reveal to potential clients that you have no opinions, nothing to say worth reading, no depth to your knowledge of real estate.

Someone asked me last week if I’d help them with their blog. Absolutely, I said. And I haven’t heard a word since, which is par for the course.

And with that, time is up for this morning … I’m off to my debut as an instructor for the Arizona real estate contract.

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