Across the country, real estate agents are scaling back their efforts to find buyers and list homes. They cite the holiday season as being the “real estate dead zone” so they make less effort to promote their businesses.This is a mistake for a few reasons.First, we all know that real estate marketing today leads to paychecks in about 90 days. Do you really want to be looking at a month or more with no closings come February, March, or April?Right now, when other agents are “asleep at the wheel,” is the time to make your presence known. But do it right.If you have a list of past clients and people in your sphere of influence, write them. But don’t write and ask them if they’re ready to buy or sell. Instead, offer them some good information and ask them to pass it on to others who will be interested.Show them that you’re on top of the local real estate market and let them know that you will be working in December should they need your assistance. Do ask for referrals, but do it as an offer of assistance, rather than a request for help.Let them know that you’re always willing to take their calls or answer their emails if they have questions about the real estate market. Their questions and your answers may be just what they need to make a decision to buy or sell. So take the time for them.If you don’t have that good list, and if you haven’t loaded it into an autoresponder, start working right there. Go back through your old files and take names, addresses, and email addresses. Then search your personal address book as well.What if your list is all postal addresses?Then it’s time to change that. Bite the bullet and send postal mail to all those people. But in that mail offer something of value if they’ll come to your site and request it. Offer something of interest to buyers and something to sellers. Let them choose one or both of your offers. Then you’ll have their email addresses – and if you’ve done it correctly, the addresses will be in your autoresponder.What about people you don’t know? Start capturing them from your real estate website using those same autoresponders. Entice buyers with one offer and sellers with another, so that you can follow up with appropriate drip marketing letters.Want to do more? Tweet about real estate. Use your Facebook page to let people know about the report you’re offering. Go to real estate related blogs and make comments. Go to Yahoo or some other site and answer people’s real estate questions. Start adding Localism posts to your Active Rain blog. And always make the offer for the free report.The second reason why you should be marketing your real estate services right now is that buyers who shop during the holiday season are usually serious about buying. Some of them have a deadline for when they need to move, so they have urgency added to interest.Holiday home sellers are also serious – if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be willing to keep their homes in showing condition during the holidays. They understand that this is a good time for them to be on the market because they know there will be less competition.Finally – This is a good time for you to market yourself as a real estate agent because you will have less competition. A whole lot of other agents have “taken themselves off the market” for the holidays. They’re either sitting around sulking, or they’ve decided to abandon their business in favor of shopping, baking, visiting with friends, or sitting home watching holiday movies on TV.Be the real estate agent who is there, available, and ready to assist.