Answer Man: Grimacing Over Real Estate Agent Ads

C an you tell me why real estate agents seem to be the only workers who publish their facial photos everywhere? Their photos appear on their business cards, Web sites, advertisements and sale signs in front of houses. No other profession has such mug shot overload. And because this profession focuses on the look and appeal of man-made structures, why do these people think we need to know what they look like?

Kate Schwarz, Fairfax

It's true. Answer Man can close his eyes and picture the real estate agents who fight and scrap over the turf in his neighborhood. There's Carol and Mary and Peggy . And don't forget the husband-and-wife team of Gabe and Kathy .

Answer Man has never met most of them, but their faces are as familiar to him as his children's, thanks to the numerous business cards, newsletters, complimentary calendars and refrigerator magnets bearing their smiling visages.

Why do real estate agents plaster their kissers everywhere? It can't be that they're all stuck up, can it?

"First of all," said Paul Valentino, regional vice president of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage, "real estate sales is a person-to-person industry. The product is real estate, but it's people-to-people. So the original concept was, 'Let's show people who they may deal with.' " (This isn't the case with commercial real estate, Paul said.)

Melinda Roark , a Coldwell Banker agent in Southern Maryland, said the face blitz is "marketing for ourselves. To me, if someone connects a face with a name, it's a stronger bond than if they just get a name."

Melinda became an agent 18 years ago, which was just about when advances in printing technology first allowed people to put their photos -- first black-and-white, then color -- on their business cards at a reasonable price.

This was followed by a rise in "personal branding" in the real estate industry. That's the desire of some agents to market themselves, or their "team," independently of their umbrella firm.

Said Paul, "Personal branding has really accelerated in the past 10 years, to the point where a person's [marketing materials] may include more information, not just a head shot, but action photos, photos with other people or of them placing a 'For Sale' sign on a property."