It's a truism that the local 10 o'clock news runs on the motto that "if it bleeds, it leads."

Real estate agents need to realize that staking their business on buying leads – or treating clients as leads – is a path to doom. "If it's leads, it bleeds," is how agents should be thinking about their business model.

Take HouseValues, for example. The stock of the company that sells leads to thousands of real estate agents (some licensed, some maybe not) is trading at $8.70 at this writing, down from a 52-week high of $20.29, and off nearly 50% in the last two months.

Some of that drop is due to Zillow's appearance on the scene, but most of it is due to the market's waking up to the fact that HouseValues does not have a substainable value proposition to offer to consumers.

Real estate agents who buy into an obsession with "leads" are as doomed as HouseValues.

We've neglected this journal for some time now, because of the press of launching Yo Chicago. Yo Chicago is now live, in skeletal form, and this site is an important part of it.

We need to involve hundreds - eventually thousands - of people who are knowledgeable about Chicagoland neighborhoods and housing-related topics.

Some of those people will volunteer for the sheer pleasure of it, or to share their knowledge with others, or to help improve their neighborhoods, but most will expect some commercial gain from investing their time. They'll write, or comment, or contribute photographs because they hope to establish business relationships with their readers.

We've set up a new site, Yo Chicagoans, to cover topics of interest to all of our volunteers, and to make it easy for them to use our sites and our tools to best accomplish their objectives.

This site focuses on helping our volunteer real estate agents, mortgage brokers, home inspectors and other local experts who are in this primarily to make a buck.

They need to learn - as we need to learn better - how to conduct a conversation on the Internet with business prospects. Mostly that's a matter of being sensitive to what people are looking for and helping them to get it. So simple. So complicated.

Last month I attended the Inman Real Estate Connect conference in San Francisco. The main topic of discussion at many of the sessions was "leads" – how to get more of them, how to “incubate" and process and manage them, and how to convert them into customers.

Browse a few sites that cater to real estate agents, and you’ll note that the obsession with leads is front and center. HouseValues, for example, bills itself as "leading the real estate industry in advanced lead generation and lead management services." HomeGain touts itself as "your best source for home seller and buyer leads." Intersend invites agents to "experience a totally automated lead management Internet marketing system …" Poke around the Web and you'll easily find hundreds more like this.

People want to do business with someone they know, trust and like, and whose opinions they respect.

People don’t like people who think of them as "leads." They don’t trust people who think like that, they don’t respect them, and they don’t want to know them.

Many real estate agents have trouble grasping that simple concept. They won’t survive the coming revolution in real estate marketing, and they won’t be missed.

A new generation of Internet tools is empowering real estate agents to engage in conversations with home buyers, sellers and renters, develop relationships with them based on demonstrated expertise and ability to generate confidence and trust.

We’re building one of those tools – HomePagesUSA.

This site is devoted to showing savvy real estate professionals how to use HomePagesUSA and other Internet tools to build relationships with home buyers and sellers, landlords and renters, and the people who influence their decisions.

When people can connect on their own terms with real estate professionals they trust and respect, the only agents looking for leads will be the soon-to-disappear losers. Those agents will be whining along with Dave Moss in Glengarry Glen Ross: "Baby, I can’t make a goddamn dollar with these leads, and you’re killing my ass on the street."

We called this site "Posting for leads" just to get your attention. If we’ve got it, let’s begin exploring how real estate professionals will make money on the Internet. It’s not, as you've doubtless guessed, by posting for leads.