The one indisputable truth about residential real estate is that it is typically a local market. At least 90% of the buyers and sellers will be from your local community. The rest are transplants - moving to or from the area. The vast majority of transactions encountered in the day to day life of a real estate investor are local ? whether it be for contractors, to find new homes to purchase, to rent out a house, etc.

When you look at the internet, you know that having a website is important. It allows you to communicate with your prospects in an efficient manner. Rather than call you, they can visit your website to get more information. But you probably think that the internet is only good as a place to hang your electronic brochure due to its international, globally connected design. We've all heard that it is the World Wide Web. As it evolved, the need and the tools to serve local businesses was realized and to a great extent solved. It is now possible to use powerful techniques previously used by companies with an international presence for your local business. Your mastery of these local web promotional tools will place you leaps and bounds above your competitors.

Let's examine some of these local oriented opportunities that can benefit you as a real estate investor.

Craigslist.com ? Craigslist is a worldwide classified site that is one of the top 10 visited sites in the United States. Craigslist is really nothing more than hundreds of local classified sites all tied together into one giant website. You just select your city and start doing business. You can do pretty much anything from posting houses for sale to renting your vacant rentals to seeking helpers to repair and maintain your property to generating leads for new business and a while lot more. Best of all ? you can post ads and respond to ads in Craigslist at no cost and you can post as many ads as you need to for your business needs any time you wish..

Pay Per Click Advertising ? If you are an active real estate investor, chances are you have a website to allow you to give more information to local residents looking to sell or buy houses among other things. Many of the larger pay per click engines ? like Google Adwords ? allow you to run your ads locally. That means if you are advertising for someone wanting to sell their house you could start an adwords campaign that would show up only for people who live in your city. Think how powerful it is to appear on the first page of google with your ad and knowing it will only show up to people who live in your city. It won't show up too many times so it won't cost much but every time it shows up, it is being seen by someone who lives and works in your city. Someone who clicks on that ad would definitely be a hot lead.

Local Classified Sites and Bulletin Boards ? Every community has a variety of local sites that allow you to post and respond to various ads. They may be community calendar type of sites or local classified sites or even big classified sites that offer city categorization like craigslist.com, backpage.com or citynews.com. You can find all the sites you could ever use by using your favorite search engine and typing the name of your city followed by the words classified ads (Houston classified ads as an example.) Even eBay.com has a real estate section where you can occasionally find or sell properties in your area. Not all local classified sites are free so you will need to do some testing to be sure your advertising dollars are being invested wisely. But isn't it worth a little time and effort to find these virtually untapped goldmines waiting for you come along and get more business?

Newspapers and Other Real Estate Databases ? Every daily newspaper is online now. And every city MLS has some public access point that can be found on local realtors websites. And there are other places like byowner.com and a variety of small databases of houses for sale that can be found by a simple search with your favorite search engine. All these places are sources for leads for your real estate business. You will find many houses for sale by letting your fingers do a bit of walking in the databases that you will not find by just talking to realtors or driving around town. Also, many of them will let you post your homes for sale into their database either for free or for a very reasonable fee. These are definitely worth checking out.

Government Resources ? Chances are your local government has an online database full of useful property details. That means you can check out prior sales of a property, the name and address of the current owner, how much they purchased the house for, the current taxes on the house and much more ? all from the comfort of your home. You can also do name searches in most government databases so you can see what other properties the owner may have which could lead to more property acquisitions for you. There are many online government resources that can benefit you in addition to the property records. Most government databases are online ? even things like pet registration databases ? which can be used to help track down the owner of a vacant house. Depending on the level of service offered, you may even be able to do things like see which properties have a tax bill mailed to an address other than the house to look for absentee owner situations.

People finders ? While not strictly a local resource, people finders must be mentioned as many investors come across situations where the owner cannot be located. There are a large number of companies out there that let you do massive nationwide record searches at a very reasonable cost to help you locate an absentee owner. Do some searching around on the internet and try a few out to find the one or two that you like the best ? and be sure to bookmark the site(s) for future reference. Finding and making a deal with just one 'disappeared' owner will pay back the small investment many, many times over. This is a good first option before going to a detective agency to hire them for a full blown skip trace. With the amount of data available online now, people can often be tracked down without going to that extreme and for an investment of less than $20. Certainly a cheap price to pay for a deal that could net you thousands of dollars.

And here is a good final tip for you. When you find a web site you like, use the bookmark feature of your web browser to save any site you find useful for easy future reference.

So next time you turn on the computer and open your web browser, think local instead of global. And stretch your mind to see how many ways you can come up with to build a list of local online resources that can help you grow your real estate investment business. You will find the time investment paying you dividends for many years to come.

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