Edmonton real estate agent Eden Hampson is a numbers man.

He jokes about being in the business for 52 years: 26 years of days and 26 years of nights. He estimates that "about 90 per cent of what I do is repeat or referral," and he knows one of his newest listings, a residential property listed at $250,000, posted 166 Internet hits in the first two days of its virtual marketing campaign.

He also tracks the number of people who visit his website looking for a house in a certain price range. His website analysis tells him what features prospective clients value most and he can tell you how many virtual buyers viewed your house on MLS.ca before they double-clicked their way to his website and a more detailed listing.

Hampson is what the technology industry calls an "early adopter.”

Eden Hampson

He started using e-mail to communicate with clients as soon as that technology was popularized in the 1990s and he launched his website's first virtual tour more than three years ago.

But make no mistake, Hampson is in the people business. Internet technology may help him connect to buyers such as the couple moving to Edmonton from England this July. By the time they contacted Hampson to arrange a house-buying jaunt about the city, "they had already been through my whole site. They knew all about me," says Hampson, who works for Re/Max Excellence in Edmonton.

The flipside of that virtual link shows they connected to Hampson's site on the recommendation of an Edmonton-based friend who'd already used Hampson's services.

The technology may be new, but from Hampson's point of view, the fundamental links are pretty darned old-fashioned.

Calgary real estate agent Gordon Ross agrees. In the early days of his five-year career in real estate, "I really had to pound the pavement and get my name out there to let people know I was a very serious and well-connected realtor."

Today, Ross still nurtures those personal ties. In deference to the Internet's sheer reach, he also makes sure an assistant manages his website data and keeps it up to date. "A lot of my clients come from referrals," notes Ross, who works for Re/Max Real Estate Central. Even so, he knows his listings, including one for a $5-million home in Calgary's Pump Hill neighbourhood, need a web presence.

"I think (an Internet presence) is extremely important," says Ross. As with all advertising and marketing strategies, however, "it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get a listing."

While it may all come down to the personal touch, statistics show the Internet's growing importance as a marketing tool in the real estate industry, says Robert Steele, the founder of Internet Brokers Group, an online marketing services firm that delivers a host of products from search-engine placement to direct e-mail marketing, website design and software applications.

According to a 2004 report from the National Association of Realtors, 53 per cent of U.S. homebuyers use the Internet "frequently as part of their home search" as an information source. That's up from 42 per cent the year before.

Today's real estate agents will "migrate onto the Internet and use it, or they won't be around," predicts Steele.

His Calgary-based company takes information from several public real estate information sites, then "auto-populates" thousands of other sites with that data, linking more than 6,500 real estate agents across Canada and the U.S.

Ten years ago, real estate agents wore out their shoes showing property to clients. These days, it's all about the mouse, says Steele.

Not only the mouse, but the successful use of technology to meet specific business goals, adds Marg Partridge, a 23-year veteran of Calgary's residential real estate industry who works with Royal LePage Foothills.

Partridge is the author of Advertising, Marketing and the Internet, a text-based course that shows real estate agents how to use Internet technology to gain access to prospective clients. Agents in Alberta can take the course to earn the professional development credits they need to maintain their licences.

An active agent and associate broker, Partridge knows some agents are just dipping into the Internet pool. That's why she was careful to make sure her text serves as a kind of desk-ready reference to some of the most basic how-to questions about e-mail and the Internet.

In class and online, however, she challenges agents to optimize their Internet presence by setting up easy-to-navigate, consumer-centric sites that let them track and analyse site use.

Because a growing number of buyers use the Internet to source information about homes and agents, she also cautions against amateurish-looking websites. "The home page is like the front door to the rest of the website," says Partridge.

Believe it or not, some of the biggest mistakes agents make involve a failure to include basic contact data on their websites, or developing a website that fails to zero in on their particular business model, says Partridge.

In a business where name recognition is so important, the business success of a particular marketing tool can be tough to measure, admits Eden Hampson. While it's far from an exact science, he gauges his site's success in Internet hits - and the occasional cold call or e-mail it generates.

Convinced it's a necessary tool in his own marketing basket, Hampson also treats the site seriously. It's been updated several times, he's looking at a major redo in the coming months and he analyses outsider use of the site to provide insight into his particular client base.

It all takes time, but few aspects of the real estate business are fast and easy, says Hampson, who views his Internet presence as an extension of a much more old-fashioned approach to the business of name recognition.

It may be virtual. It has to be real.

(Joy Gregory can be reached at joy@businessedge.ca)