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Long & Foster real estate agent Tommy Helm saw a way to use his memories of buying his first car to inspire people to buy their first home. He posted his nostalgic story to his office's blog in hopes that it would send a warm glow through a potential home buyer's heart -- and inspire that person to call him.

Real estate is trying to board the blogging bandwagon, and a group of local real estate agents is perhaps one of the forerunners in this trend in the Roanoke Valley.

In late October, some real estate agents at the Long & Foster Real Estate office in Daleville started their own blog. It's an online diary of sorts, a place where they write about the houses they are selling, the Roanoke Valley's quality of life, give advice on how to obtain a home loan and list the area's accolades, such as its ranking as a top place to retire.

Blogs are popping up at a time when the Internet is becoming more important in real estate sales. Research from the National Association of Realtors shows that 74 percent of home buyers use the Internet in some part of their home search. In 1995, only 2 percent of home buyers went online to look for new homes.

Dolores Farmer, vice president at the Daleville real estate office, got the idea for the blog after reading an article about real estate blogging in the Wall Street Journal.

Farmer said she once thought blogs were a fad until she discovered Really Simple Syndication, a program that feeds Web sites that consumers choose to them every day. She thought RSS would help draw people to her office's blog.

"We can go to the consumer," she said. "They don't have to remember us. If they scan our headlines for the day, and they're not interested, they'll just pass by."

Farmer created the blog through Google's blogsearch function.

And though it hasn't yet resulted directly in the sale of a home, the agents believe the new tool is getting the word out about their company and them.

"Anytime we can get our name out is a good thing," Helm said.

Some weeks there are daily entries while other weeks, submissions might pop up several times. The agents blog as much and as often as they want. Of the office's 70 agents, about 30 are blogging, Farmer said.

Brenda Layman, another agent with the Long & Foster office, pointed out the benefits of the blog -- to reach younger home buyers who often are more Internet-savvy.

"We're reaching out to a market that we might not reach otherwise," said Layman, who has written blog entries about the Roanoke Valley's attractions for horse lovers and another about entertainment in Roanoke.

But real estate blogs alone don't necessarily drive buyers to purchase a certain house. They often are the first step to connect a person to a real estate company's Web site where they might find other home listings and information. Most firms link to their own home pages from their blog sites, said Heather Consalvi, director of implementation and client relations for Pro Step Marketing, a firm in Huntersville, N.C. The company works with real estate agents and firms nationwide to help them market their services, including creating blogs.

"We don't find a lot of people just calling about an ad they found on a blog," Consalvi said.

To be sure, some local real estate companies aren't keen on the idea of blogging. Wayne Cundiff, who along with his wife owns Park Place Realtors in Roanoke, said his company has gotten huge responses from home buyers through its link to realtor.com, a Web site on which real estate firms pay to advertise homes.

Cundiff said blogs don't target home buyers like the realtor.com listing does.

"The shotgun approach doesn't necessarily work," he said. "You have to target your market."

Another drawback to having a blog through a real estate or any other company is monitoring what the employees write, said Tom Markiewicz, chief executive officer of EvolvePoint, a company in Blacksburg that helps firms set up RSS feeds.

"You have a danger of them saying things that might offend people," he said. "There's a fine line between being open and honest with customers, clients and readers as opposed to them not giving any information at all."

Some other real estate firms locally have not yet delved into the land of blogging, but many have Web sites on which they post home listings. MKB Realtors in Roanoke even has its own cable television show where it displays homes for sale, said Kit Hale, general manager at the firm.

Hale said he recognizes that the Internet is more important than ever for selling homes, and he has taken some focus off of "verbose" print advertisements for MKB, while instead trying to "promote and drive traffic to our Web site."

Ultimately, though, a home buyer values contact with a person -- a real estate agent -- and that often leads to the final home sale. Walter Molony, a spokesman for the National Association of Realtors, said there are two factors that a home buyer uses to assess whether they will use a real estate agent: the agent's reputation and knowledge of the market, according to an NAR survey.

And what about their blogs?

"All of these other things are kind of peripheral," Molony said.

Visit the Long & Foster Daleville office's blog at roanokerealestate.blogspot.com/