To Sell to Gen-Y, You Have to Meet Them Online

Despite the housing recession, there are still more than 1.5 million real estate agents in the United States.

Real estate agents are used to competing heartily against one another for listings. They're used to competing against other agents who have comparable houses for sale in the same neighborhood. Local Realtor organizations host award ceremonies each year to recognize real agents with the most sales. Heck, real agents are even used to fighting for ad space in the local media.

But on the World Wide Web, the nature of real estate competition is changing -- particularly for those interested in snagging Gen Y-ers, those young and future home buyers who are now in their 20s.

For real estate agents, finding these buyers and interacting with them requires some of the same skills your teenager might have already mastered, combined with a mastery of local real estate and demographic information.

The second iteration of the Internet is known as Web 2.0, and at its core is social networking. Over the past four months, we've been dipping our toes into the social networking world, to better understand how today's teens and those in their 20s interact with one another and the outside world -- and what this means for real estate.

We started by launching Ilyce Glink sites at Facebook, MySpace, Current.com, Friendster, Bebo and elsewhere. These sites feature some of the real estate and personal finance content I've created through the years. The other part of our social networking strategy includes "twittering" regularly at Twitter.com/glink, uploading dozens of videos about real estate and personal finance to YouTube.com/expertrealestatetips, and signing up for LinkedIn.com, a site that allows business colleagues and partners to network, and tends to pitch toward a somewhat older crowd.

There are plenty of real estate agents, brokers, investors, educators and mortgage lenders who are already active on these sites.

Are you a real estate professional who wants to stand out in a crowd? There are fewer than 14,000 members of the "Real Estate Investing" group on MySpace, and fewer than 15,000 members of the top five real estate groups on Facebook. While that seems like a lot of people, there are probably few who live in your own neighborhood. You can also demonstrate your expertise by engaging in a group discussion.

Or, go for the "big fish in a small pond" mentality. There are loads of real estate-related groups to join that have fewer than 100 members. Social networking sites allow you to "friend" members of these groups, and start a group of your own.

You can join or start real estate-related groups with location-specific ties. Brokers with expertise in a specific neighborhood start groups that might provide information about a three-block-square area. Buyers and sellers interested in the happenings of that micro-market will be able to find out information that may be unavailable elsewhere. That can make your group popular.

If you're a broker in a college town with students who may be looking for a home, you might be able to link them into your site so they could get updates about neighborhoods they might want to live in after graduation. Agents are also connecting to one another, setting up relationships that can be profitable by increasing their referral networks.

The person heading up our initiative is our intern Claire Young, a student at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. Her observation? Although she says she learned about social networking in college, the next generation of kids will have social networking in their blood.