I was invited by Home Gain General Manager Louis Cammarosano to contribute to their real estate blog. After checking out the website and blog, talking to Lou and learning more about Home Gain, it appeared to be a useful site for consumers and real estate agents.
Home Gain has a reputation as a Web 1.0 company. We’re going to “supe up” their Web 1.0 stock car with a Web 2.0 turbocharger. Buckle up there, Sweet Lou.
Some little known facts about Home Gain:
1. Homegain consistently attracts more visitors than darlings Zillow and Trulia. That’s big.
2. Homegain has been profitable for the past four fiscal years and should be again in 2008. I think a company that makes money is doing something right. Another big plus.
3. HomeGain pioneered the concept of instant home valuation, a concept adopted by Zillow (those copycats).
4. Trulia currently rents its neighborhood maps from Home Gain, who developed them in 2005.
5. Homegain has over 1.3 million listings on Homescout .
6. Sister company, Homescape is a listing site powered by 170 newspapers.
7. Homegain also operates real estate agent/consumer matching website Agentevaluator.com
8. Over 75% of their customers buy their products directly online.
9. HomeGain was sold to Classified Ventures in June 2005 (a consortium of major national newspapers, including the Tribune, Washington Post and Gannett). I wonder if they’ll run Selltoons?
10. HomeGain now has the best guest bloggers (this little known fact won’t stay that way for long).
I will be joining this great group of bloggers:
Come by and say hi. (I’ll tell you how you can leverage your know-how to get a FREE cruise in my first post).
Technorati Tags: Home Gain, blogging, blogs, Sellsius, Joseph Ferrara
Joe
Welcome to the HomeGain blog! We eagerly await your contributions and insights.
Regards
Louis
Joe,
This makes it difficult for me- I think you’re a great guy and I like you, but HomeGain is a poor, pathetic, horrible, crappy, stupid company that de-values the entire industry and has no redeeming value in society.
While I hope you are successful, just don’t lose your integrity trying to find nice things to say about them.
Their reputation, as low as it is, will never be as low as their business model. They suck information from consumers by fooling them into a false pretense of value and then sell that information to anyone willing to pay for it. Consumers get nothing of value, the agents get their industry reputation smeared even more, and Homegain just keeps on sucking.
Greg
Didn’t you just lose a little integrity of you own with that post?
Is it the mark of a man of integrity to refer to another company “poor, pathetic, horrible, crappy, stupid company that de-values the entire industry and has no redeeming value in society.”
Does your outfit blue roof 360 advance mankind so much further than HomeGain?
Lighten up-Joe will be providing marketing advise to HomeGain’s customers. Joe’s integrity will remain intact.
Louis, having integrity is being true to yourself, so yes, stating what I believe is having integrity.
It’s nothing personal against you or anyone at HomeGain. I am sure there are many fine people at the company. It’s not the people I have a problem with, it’s the business model.
Yes, I believe my company advances the industry by providing a way for agents and brokers to move away from damaging models, like HomeGain, and get their own online business and brand themselves online instead of paying a third-party website for leads.
HomeGain does not list homes or sell homes- it is not a real estate company. It is a “lead” wholesaler. And believe me, I say “lead” with the greatest of latitude.
Collecting consumer info for the purpose of selling it to anyone who will pay does not advance the industry- it holds it back and gives it a big, shiny black eye by perpetuating the all-too pervasive stereotype that real estate agents think in terms of “leads” instead of people.
Advancing the industry is about putting the consumer first and providing things for them even if it’s not just about making money. You might not know much about that- you said it yourself- you think all the Real Estate 2.0 stuff is a failure.
And one of your four reasons for the failure is “The Consumer Experience is Too Good”.
(http://blog.homegain.com/failed-promise-Real-Estate-2-0)
I have nothing against you personally- but I have to say, respectfully, of all things to debate, being an employee of HomeGain, integrity in business models is not one of them.
Greg
Your second response reflects slightly better on you than your first.
The concept of the middle man exists in all industries-there is no lack of integrity in acting as one.
Good luck with 360.
Louis
home gain is a lead aggregation company. I am surprised that so many of our best bloggers joined the dark side.
It looks to me like some people are blaming Homegain for their lack of ability to use leads, traffic or any other tool Homegain provides to create new customers. I have joined pretty much ever lead and traffic company out there. I have spent many thousands of dollars to figure out if lead generation companies have value. In reality, many do not. However, with that said, I started using Homegain a year and a half ago with their buyer link program and my business doubled last year and we expect to add another 50% this year…at least.
The dark side…hmmmm interesting comment. Anything that helps me connect with new customers can hardly be considered the dark side. My two offices generates 50-80 buyer leads per day, each and every day. With those buyer leads also come a good amount of listings. I just don’t see a dark side. It’s all bright and sunny here in Florida!
Maybe I should give you a little factual history - I was spending $10k per month on Google and Yahoo when a rep from Homegain called on me. Of course after spending many thousands of dollars on other programs, I had determined that I could do it better myself. After listening to the Homegain rep, I cautiously tested $1,000 of my budget because it did make a little bit of sense. After all, I was spending over $2 per click and this guy said he could get me .99 per click. Almost immediately, a funny thing happened. Our click to lead conversion rate went from a little over 7% to a little over 16% (now we are 20%) and best of all, I was paying half of what I was paying before. This meant that I could double my lead flow with the same amount of money. That’s pretty darn awesome if you ask me!
Luckily we had already mastered the art of converting an Internet lead to a customer and eventually a sale. Each year we seem to be getting better and better at the conversion process. So by doubling our lead flow, I doubled my sales. My business is now extremley easy to predict and this is during the worst real estate market this area (brevard county florida) has seen in 20 years.
Is Homegain perfect. Of course not. Is your company perfect? I know my company is far from perfect. Homegain may not be for everyone, but if you use it for what it is, then it can be quite lucrative. I talk with Agents all around the country that I have helped create their lead conversion systems. Once that is done, the potential is tremendous. I believe that Homegain does go out of its way to better itself as well as it’s participating Agents. Can they come to your office and help you make sales, probably not? Can they supply you with enough traffic to insure your sales growth? Absolutely.
Before you quickly lump Homegain in with all the other lead generation companies, it may be important to look in the mirror and see if you are giving 100% on your end to utilize their system. Once consumers get to your site, you need to have a means of capturing and converting them to your customers. If you would like feedback on why you are not being successful with Homegain or just your Internet program in general, please don’t hesitate to email me at mitch@mitchrealty.com. My guess is that your frustration comes from a lack of success with your Internet program than Homegains ability to drive it’s traffic to your website. Ok, I’ll stop rambling because I really do need to get some work done here! Have a very productive week and keep on smiling!
Thank you all for commenting.
We all believe in freedom of choice, both for consumers and real estate agents. We may not agree with their choice, but we all feel giving them choices allows them to try different methods and go with the one that works best for them. They will adopt that which serves their needs and abandon what does not. And each person is different. If we believe in the free market system, the consumer will ultimately decide what works and what fails. I guess we can all live with that.
I also believe in change. If Home Gain is doing something wrong, they will have to adapt or die. I hope to be an agent for positive change, to bring what I’ve learned from my experience and from knowing you Greg and Teresa and many other hard working and dedicated professionals to help consumers and real estate professionals. I will give them information and if that information helps them make better choices, I will feel satisfied.
[Besides, the dark side always loses anyway. Witness the death of C. Whiz
to TB]
Hmm..The issue of leads and people has given me an idea for a post.
For the record what I have against homegain is that it does a disservice to consumers who may beleive that they are getting an agent who is special in some way and knows the market area. i did a homegain test from a consumer point of view. It will be published in a few days and I’ll send a link. I have also written posts for consumers on how not to become a lead.
Joe,
As you know I am not a big fan of companies that work as the “middle man” with regards to real estate. I side with Teresa B. on that one.But I also trust you and your judgement in attempting to work with any business that moves from web1 to web2. Some of us in real estate are lucky enough to have a good sized referral business and consumer/clients from blogging;connecting in a real way with that business model transends web1. Sad to say most agents do not have this concept as their working model for income, So anything that can help(even for a price) must be utilized. I know you well enough to say that you do not jump into anything without your homework in place. Just another reason for you to call me.
The opposition against the “middle” man appears much stronger in real estate than in other industries.
I don’t see the same opposition against car dealerships (why not buy your car directly from Detroit), department stores or similar middlemen. Middle man combine economies of scale in a way that makes it cost effective to use them.
Besides, isn’t the biggest middleman GOOGLE? If you are to be a successful blogger, you need to write to satify google first so that consumers will find you.
To clarify what HomeGain does as a “middleman”-we do a lot of what the individual realtor can not do on their own so that we can send visitors to your web site.
-we aggregate 300 traffic partnerships,
-we spend millions of dollars in search engine marketing on Google, Yahoo and MSN, managing millions of key words in the process
-we drive millions to HomeGain.com directly through 9 years of brand awareness
-we have high SEO rankings
Think of HomeGain as a co-op for realtors-you can tap into the combined marketing resources of Homegain for a fee.
If you have all the clients you need or can generate them on your own, by all means don’t use homegain.
If you need some marketing support, HomeGain offers it generally at a cost comparable to buying key words on Google with a difference- our customers report that our traffic converts higher and you don’t have to manage any key words and the visits are delivered to you evenly over the course of a month.
Louis - I think I wrote a post once about how it is the “lead aggregation” comapnies that should be disinter mediated. They add no value and use out listings as bait and then “sell leads” right back to us.
Teresa
I’d love to see it. I am not convinced that the argument “they take our content and then try to sell us leads back” applies to HomeGain. You see, we don’t take your listings like most every other real estate portal out there does. Our products drive visitors from HomeGain directly TO Realtors. Take a look on our site-we do NOT lure visitors to our site by using YOUR listings. We get visitors to our site through organic traffic to HomeGain.com. paid search, 300 traffic partners and SEO.
We do NOT display listings on Homegain.com.Any listings shown, are shown on the Realtors’ site. We simply direct our visitors, for a fee through our buyerlink program to the realtors’ sites who display the listing.
There is a huge difference between HomeGain’s model-which markets the realtor’s site vs Zillow, Trulia, move.com and counteless other listings sites who take listing feeds from realtors and then try to advertising back to them through “featured listings” and banner ads .
I hear you Kim. Those agents that are able, or have built a solid referral network, can get enough business that they do not need any help from anyone. But those that are unable, or don’t have the network (say an agent who is new, or new to a market), or want to try to get more business, or try a new method, these folks will use sites like Home Gain. I think those that gain from it (no pun intended), will stick with it, those that don’t won’t. But it is a good thing to have choices.
Also, I live by a credo: There is nothing that cannot be improved or enhanced.
Right on, Joe..
Joseph - it is very empowering to build a network. It is hard work but in the end it is worth it not having to depend upon third parties. In the web 2.0 world each of us has more power on the internet than ever before. it is the web 1.0 ideas that have people thinking they need a company behind them helping and linking. Companies take advantage of us by trying to get us to provide content for them. We can put that very same content on our own blogs and will come out ahead.
Teresa
I’ll ask what content does the realtor give to homegain? We don’t have realtor listings on Homegain.com
Actually are not Zillow and Trulia-even though they are web 2.0 companies, the real threat as they are taking realtor listings to draw consumers to their sites so they can try and sell featured listings back to realtors.
Think of homegain instead who merely does marketing for realtors that they can’t do for themselves, like arrange 300 traffic and lead partners, manage millions of key words etc so we can drive traffic to YOU.
Web 1.0 companies, like Homegain are not your biggest threat.
Companies in general are the threat to re.net practitioners as they seek to disintermediate the network.
Web 2.0 companies are a bigger threat than 1.0 as 1.0 companies are not competiting on the network, we are competing perhaps in keyword bidding, something the re.net doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of interest in.
We are disintermediators only in our competition for attention on Google-the largest obstacle between realtors and consumers.
Think of HomeGain as a large coop for realtors, to help them negotiate search and other traffic acquisition strategies, not disintermediators.
Louis - I don’t see homegain as a threat, and I don’t see the “web 2.0″ sites as a threat either.
Two years ago I sent $500 to Homegain. I received the worst leads I could possible have received. Regurgitated email addresses of homeowners with absolutely no intention of selling who had already been contacted by no less than 3 other agents in my geographic area. I complained about the quality of the leads. They told me to pound sand and send more money if I wanted “better leads”. If Mr. Cammarosano was in charge during the summer of 2006 as he is now, I would suggest you not align yourself with this company.
If you are not an agent who has been duped by this company and its business practices you will not understand how I feel and you will dismiss my comments. If you are an agent who has been violated by this lead aggregator, you hope and pray that the individuals who have been convinced to join the ranks of “homegain bloggers” will withdraw their support as soon as possible for the good of real estate agents.
Tony
Thanks for the comments. I’d like to discuss your experience with Homegain. May I email or call you? Also love the definitions of Realtor and UnRealtor on your blog.
Sure Lou. My blog site has all my contact info.
…Just another Realtor who was dissatisfied with her HomeGain experience. I am, like Teresa, surprised to see Realtors going there to blog, though I have heard of people who had better experiences than I had.
Louis, Realtors are already the “middle man.” Does the middle man need a middle man? Some apparently do, or HomeGain wouldn’t be around.
Louis,
Car dealers and departments stores have products they keep in stock so consumers can try them on (out),pay and take those products home with them. HomeGain does not stock anything.
Homegain does not bring anything of value to the industry. You don’t show homes to buyers, you don’t represent sellers or any clients, you don’t further the industry in any way.
The business model of HomeGain is to scrape info and sell it. You can call it being a “middleman” and dress it up any way you want, but there is no integrity in that business model and it damages the agents you claim to be helping by driving consumers away from the agent brand, so even when an agent does get a good lead (in the middle of hundreds of bad ones) the consumer has the HomeGain brand as the source of the agent help, not the agent or broker brand.
Many times the consumer will not remember the contact info for the agent, and they don’t know the brand of that agent because they found them on your lead-gen site.
It’s okay to be proud of your company and to defend it, but I think most agents and brokers are moving away from that type of lead generation and into getting their own leads, and then having those people become clients, through their own websites and branding. And I think that is much better for the agents, brokers, and the client.
Greg
Obviously you are passionate about being against HomeGain and that passion has clouded your incentive to discover what HomeGain actually does.
Let’s take a look at some of your perceptions of what HomeGain does and what we actually do
“don’t show homes to buyers, you don’t represent sellers or any clients” This statement is correct.
I am sure if we did you would say since we are not REAL realtors we should’nt be entitled to do so!
“helping by driving consumers away from the agent brand”
This is 100% incorrect. Our buyerlink product drives consumers DIRECTLY to the agent’s or broker’s site where they control the show. We say its your show -we bring the audience. On the contrary to your statement we drive consumers directly to the agent brand.
“I think most agents and brokers are moving away from that type of lead generation and into getting their own leads”
You may think that (or wish it to be true)but our business is growing. If agents and brokers can get their own leads-more power to them.
What you missing is the way homegain generates visitors to our customers sites is NOT by scraping listings or convincing a broker to give us listings like counteless other listings aggregators do.
We don’t do it because we don’t display listings on our web site.
The argument that we are taking realtor’s content (listings) and re branding it as our own does not apply to HomeGain.
What we provide to agents is a service-they want visitors to their web site. We manage millions of key words so they don’t have to, we’ve organized and manage over 300 traffic partners, we have brand recognition so people come to homegain because they know they can find a realtor there.
So yes we are a middle man and provide a service for agents and brokers that don’t have the time, resources, or inclination to drive their own leads or visitors to their websites.
Lack of integrity in providing a service that some agents/brokers are willing to pay for because they do not WANT or find it cost effective to do so? Hardly!
Just posted on HomeGain another realtor who LOVES HomeGain’s buyerlink
(also see above Mitch Ribak’s endorsement of the product)
http://blog.homegain.com/building-pipeline-with-homegain-buyerlink
Greg
If you learn one thing about HomeGain-We Do NOT scrape information listings or otherwise from realtors and sell it back to them.
We drive visitors to our site and funnel them to realtor’s sites.
Save your hate for all the companies that post realtor listings and try to sell them back featured listings and other ad packages….
HomeGain is simply a marketer for Realtors.