Making Connections

A good agent should be able to answer detailed neighborhood-specific questions, said Heather Mirjahangir Fernandez, Trulia's vice president of marketing.

"Local content is king," Fernandez said. "In the old world you'd have to talk to someone and interview them to make sure they were a local expert, now you can verify that on your own in advance of any kind of face-to-face meeting." Questions posted on Trulia are typically answered within 20 minutes, she said, and the average question gets three answers.

Many home buyers are as interested in agents' online personas as they are in their specific expertise.

Danilo Bogdanovic, a real estate agent with Market Advantage Real Estate, says he uses a wide array of social networks to draw potential clients to his blog and its copious information on the Loudoun County real estate market, but he also attracts clients by getting them interested in him personally. Potential clients can follow him using Twitter, a microblogging service where users write short updates about what they're doing at any given moment.

Interspersed with updates on his blog, Bogdanovic gives personal updates ("Back from a long bike ride -- hungry and ready to make some dinner"), comments on news articles ("Is everyone in the DC metro area too busy to date, not want to get hitched, crazy or all of the above?") and keeps his followers abreast of his real estate business ("On the way to Alexandria for a closing. Looks like my short-sale listing may finally be settling after 3 months of negotiations.") .

This type of personal information spurred Dan Shields, 41, to contact Bogdanovic.

"It came down to these other two agents. I didn't know anything about them," Shields said. Bogdanovic "was the only one you could get a personality from."

Bogdanovic recently helped Shields and his wife, Brenda, close on the purchase of a Leesburg house.

But choosing an agent online has its own risks.

Information that agents post about themselves -- those glowing testimonials, for example -- should be verified. But social networks can sometimes make the job easier.

For instance, when she was in the market for a home two years ago, Fernandez found a potential agent through some online social networks, and then searched through her LinkedIn account for mutual contacts. She found two of the agent's former clients and contacted them. They gave him rave reviews, and so she went ahead and worked with him.

And on Trulia, consumers see how agents fared answering other buyers' and sellers' questions -- agents are listed with the number of questions they have answered, the number of best answers, and the number of useful answers.