The laptop computer is rapidly becoming the most important tech tool you can have at your listing presentation. A few years ago the center piece of the presentation was a fancy folder with print outs of your sales, awards, and advertisements. Let’s face it, some of those flyers are getting old looking and may be a big tattered. That is all slowly fading away as the laptop can show all of the above with scans, but more importantly show that you are an expert in online / internet marketing.

The last interview I went on was for a $2,400,000 home with owners that were older but tech savy. I knew I needed to be able to show them how real estate marketing had changed since they purchased a home 35 years earlier. Remember that this was before Multiple Listing Services and the internet, where newspapers and yard signs were all you really had. The first thing I showed them was how there was a 2 percent chance someone would find their home in a newspaper and that their was an 80-90 percent chance that it would be found online. This is where I said I would be focusing my marketing efforts with the main tool being a property website. Right there in middle of the interview I was able to get out the laptop and show them their home already placed in a website and ready to market. Then I was able to show them another listing’s hit statistics (part of the powersite tools) where over the course of 3 months the home had 20,000 hits! I told them that the old seller question of “How many calls are we getting?” was being replaced by ” How many hits are we getting!” They were amazed at how things had changed and I got the listing.

So if you don’t have a laptop go get one. A basic PC will do. I use a 17 inch PowerBook because the screen is huge and shows well. Get a flatbed scanner and scan all your paper presentation material because you can still use it in a slide show or PowerPoint type of program. Get a wireless card so you can be online at the listing presentation. Get your browser open and have it with numerous tabs open. You need to show them the single property website AND have the links to Realtor.com, Google Base, Trulia, Propsmart, and several other real estate portals open showing your listings. The powersites automatically get fed to all these portals which means you’ll be getting hits!