We feel that your top three strengths are:
1. A willingness and ability to provide real-time advice regarding pricing and marketability of your clients' property even though the 'numbers' were not always in line with our thinking at the time.
2. Superb communications with your clients using cell phones, answering service, e-mail, faxes, Web Site, and normal advertising. We remained in touch even though separated by countries and time zones. The execution of this sale required all these media to coordinate efforts by owners located in Utah, Florida, Ohio, and Ontario. Your answering service is to be especially commended. Always cheerful/efficient and resulting in a return call from you within the hour!
3. State-of-the-art equipment, methodology, and receptiveness to your clients' needs. Specifically; the ability to come to remote water properties with your floatplane; use of a sharp Web Site to promote properties (including aerial photos) plus Linking to client-supplied ancillary property images; providing entrees to secondary services needed by sellers such as a very knowledgeable accounting firm for handling non-Canadian tax problems and prospective buyers of surplus after-sale personal property and equipment; and tailoring property advertising to meet clients' needs. i.e., a 'for sale billboard big as a boathouse door' which we deemed necessary to convey the message to passing boaters.

Worked for us! Kind regards, Dave and Jane Simshauser Simshausers@aol.com

We have just bought a six acre island in Lake Panache, Ontario, from England, using a combination of visits to the net, mail, email and fax.

I had collected the names of realtors selling property in the area in which I was interested, south and south west of Sudbury, during a previous visit to the area, but before sending for details of property I consulted the directory of Ontario Realtors, my first property buying visit to the internet, and found Phil Chandler’s name and web site address.

I visited the web site before property details I requested by mail arrived, found there the basic details of the property, which immediately appealed to us, and by using links provided on the website clicked open two pictures of the property.

The real advantage of using a website to sell property is that pictures can be viewed from the web on ones own screen. Only a few of the properties on this particular site had visual links; if there had been more of them, there would obviously be more opportunity for potential purchasers to browse, and I think a large website would probably be worth maintaining, particularly when selling is taking place over a distance. In this case we were buying property in Ontario from a vendor in the SE United States without leaving England

Email was also very useful during the negotiations - short messages passed to and fro between me and Phil Chandler, so that at every stage of the transaction I was aware of how negotiations stood. This was a far more flexible in my case than communication by fax because I did not have a dedicated fax line and had to rely on a work fax machine, so communication with the mortgage broker and lawyer I used, who were not email users, was much slower and more time consuming. If legal documents could be scanned into a computer and transmitted by email, and title searches effected electronically, this would facilitate quicker and cheaper selling.

It would certainly have taken us much longer to make an offer on the island had it not been for the internet - photos would have had to have been sent across the Atlantic, and more letters and phone calls exchanged.

If I was buying property again, I would certainly look for a realtor with a website, and preferably one that let me browse through pictures of property for sale.