My wife and I are in the process of purchasing a new home. This will be our first ever, and we are very excited. We’ve settled on a beautiful two-story – one we would not be able to buy had it not been for Internet marketing (but that’s another post for another day).

For several years now I’ve been teaching free Internet Marketing classes at our local library. Up until this past year, there were two other guys teaching there as well. One was a local PC-fix-it guy, teaching classes on memory upgrades, anti-virus software, etc. The other guy was a local realtor. Oddly enough, he was teaching Excel classes. Nonetheless, we all became friends with a common thread, helping out the community.

So when it came time for my wife and I to get a house, we already had someone that we wanted to use. But had we not, most likely we would have gone online to find someone. I’d probably type in something like ‘real estate agents in arnold mo’

Besides Google’s ‘Local 10′ listings, this page really only shows me one ‘actual’ real estate agent – Gwen Reynolds (result #5). Looking through Gwen’s website, its obvious that the page is not at all search-optimized, but rather she was just lucky enough to have a title tag that worked for her. This is very typical.

As local search continues to grow, realtors that haven’t optimized their websites are missing one of the biggest opportunities to get new clients. At an average 3% commission per house sold, they are passing by a huge amount of money every day that their website goes on unoptimized.

I think it’s fair to say that 90% or more of local real estate agents use some sort of proprietary website that their company gives them. Every page on their site is just like every page on their co-worker’s website, minus the very few personal things they’ve changed. These pages are usually cheap (or free from their company) and the real estate agents use them as just another way to show their houses. There is little or no personalization, no mention of local events or pictures of local landmarks.

Interestingly, a search for ‘arnold mo realtor’ produces similar results. There’s Gwen at the top (once again, I’m betting this is because of her title tag and not because the page is optimized). Why aren’t any realtors optimizing their websites for local terms?

LocalOnliner recently mentioned the real estate agent v search conundrum as well. The most interesting thing to me there is that the process of selling a house with use of online tools isn’t all that great either. My wife and I used our real estate agent’s MLS program, but ironically enough the house that we found wasn’t even listed in his system.

A while back my real estate buddy mentioned to me that he was considering purchasing domain names for each of his listings – ie 456MainStreet.com. I thought this was a phenomenal idea. Some agents are doing this, because I remember seeing signs with URLs at the bottom of them in some yards. This isn’t a very widespread idea yet, but could be a great way for agents to rank for tons of local terms including small towns, community nicknames and even street names. Load up a nice virtual tour and some unique content and your chances of selling (and ranking) go up dramatically. Take some pointers from sites like Trulia and you’ve got a home run.

Online search for homes is only going to grow. Newspaper ads, untargeted direct mailing and real estate magazines are going to dwindle as Gen-X house buyers grow. Throw in mobile search and real estate agents have a very untapped market at their hands.

Note: Interestingly enough, shortly after posting this, I found a great conference for real estate agents: Kelsey’s Drilling Down on Local ‘08. Looks to be a great conference, particularly for REA’s.