These days, buyers and sellers are burning the midnight URL

It used to be that Sunday afternoon drivers creeping down neighborhood streets, scanning lawns for "for sale" signs symbolized the real-estate shopper.

"Now, I always say, it's the midnight surfer," said Lynn Boyd, a real estate agent with The Phyllis Browning Co. in San Antonio, Tex.

About 80 percent of home buyers search the Internet for new homes before contacting a real estate agent, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Several Web sites have come online recently, such as Zillow.com and Trulia.com, which offer map-based real-estate searching and property value estimates. Home buyers can spend hours online looking at pictures and descriptions of homes for sale. And sellers can figure out how to price their homes based on sale-price estimates in their neighborhoods.

"You've got much more sophisticated consumers now than 10 or 15 years ago," Boyd said. "By the time you meet them, they've already been online and taken virtual tours and all that."

Since most real-estate buyers are at least tech-savvy enough to use real-estate search sites, most real-estate professionals want to be on top of their technology game.

Many real estate agents and mortgage brokers maintain their own Web sites, and some keep profiles on social networking sites such as Myspace.com, Facebook.com and Linkedin.com.

Jaime Marin, a real-estate agent with Keller Williams Realty, created a Myspace profile a few months ago. Instead of the typical pictures of people making sexy eyes and holding up two fingers, Marin's profile features shots of a two-bedroom condo in the Medical Center area, which he has listed at $75,000.

Under "Who I'd Like to Meet," Marin writes, "First time home buyers, Foreclosures, Investors, Construction and Development companies, Property Management, Anyone interested in selling, purchasing property or making profit in Real Estate."

But he's gotten just one or two sales leads from the site, and those didn't pan out.

He gets far more leads from his Web site, www.jaimemarinrealtor.com, which he promotes on his business card and a window sticker on his car.

Real-estate agents, who were among the first to lug around those huge 20-pound mobile phones back in the day, now have to be on top of search-engine strategies to draw traffic to their Web sites.

Al Cannistra, a real-estate agent with Bradfield Properties, has a Web site that gets hundreds of hits a day. His Web address is www.mysatexas.com.

Cannistra owns about 50 URL names, including www.bulverdevillage.com, www. cibolocanyon.com and www.lookout canyon.com, which all forward to his site. The names are similar to those of subdivisions in the San Antonio area.

"Every time I see a name that I think is important, I buy it," he said. "I get 38 hits a day because people typed in 'cibolocanyon' without the 's.' "

Cannistra, who says that about half of his clients come from his Web site, also gets clicks by linking to as many real-estate sites as possible.

And he's designed his site, which doesn't get income from advertising, to serve his customers' needs. It includes links to builder Web sites, financing information and other resources.

It also includes some fun stuff - pictures of clients' babies, recipes and a games page for kids.

"You have to do something that differentiates you from the rest," he said. *