The Homegain Advantage
As has been announced, Homegain has added consumer-facing blogs to the agent's maketing tools who use their system. For many agents this will be a useful tool and it adds punch to the starter-kit Homegain provides. before I talk too much about "starter kit" let me say that i realize many established agents use Homegain and might find the use of the term "starter kit" as condescending -- it's not meant that way, it's just that this is the area where I see the Homegain Advantage. I understand Homegain products can be useful to agents with experience, but the new agents or agents who don't want to bother with online marketing are the real opportunity for growth for Homegain.
I believe the more they strengthen the whole "starter kit" idea the clearer the advantage becomes. Every company ought to be able to simply explain their value -- here, with Homegain, it's the value of having online marketing set-up and managed with no hassle and no need for specialized knowledge.
The trade-off is independence. Agents will become dependent on Homegain and Homegain's future. But if an agent believes that homegain will be around, or some other company take its place, and they are getting business from the "starter kit" model, then it's doesn't matter if their involvement is strengthening Homegain because they see the company as a partner in their online efforts -- if their partner becomes strong, they become strong. Time will tell if the agents are acting wisely or setting themselves up.
However, as a business model, I think Homegain has the opportunity to tap into a growing interest in online real estate marketing from many, many agents who will be looking for easy, quick solutions. Good or bad in the long run? I don't know.
Mike Farmer
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Mike Good points.
When you rely on any thing or any one you incur risk. You also,however incur risks by relying only on yourself.
Let's take a look at the risks of relying on your self to do marketing.
For starters if you are self marketing you have to "write for Google" and achieve SEO prominence on Google.
BUT what if Google is supplanted as the preferred search engine? What if people abandon google in droves for some unknown to us reason right now.
Then all of your efforts could be wiped away. If you are with a company like HomeGain who spends all of its time thinking about these types of eventualities and diversifies its traffic sources, you might be safer relying on us instead of "yourself".
Indeed you are relying on the fact that Google will always be the way to market oneself online.
What if the provider of "your own blog" folds, then you'd have to transfer your site to another provider, assuming you have backed it up and assuming it can be down flawlessly.
If you want to really avoid risk, market in as many places and using as many means as possible, INCLUDING HOMEGAIN.
True independence is a fallacy, we are all interdependent and our "safety" is a factor of the quality of the interdependent relationships we form.
Yes, we're all dependent on something. My goal is to leverage everything that works best for me. Good point.
I do like the fact Homegain is directly hooking up with agents.
However, I'm having some serious problems with other RE sites in the web 2.0 world. I will be writng a series of posts about this regarding these sites who don't partner well with agents.
I have a feeling that if Homegain continues to help agents in a true, transparent fashion it will be on the top of this race.
Please do.
I would like to see an analysis on many of the "real estate" sites from the view point of what do they do for the realtor, how do they help them?
If a real estate site's main concern is to sell ads, the real estate customer is not its customer.
HomeGain makes money only if real estate agents are successfu - they are our customers.
We send our traffic exclusively to agents, the new blogging product is ad free and features a real estate agent exclusively and the agent evaluator product only works if the agent closes a deal.
So HG's interests are directly alligned with our realtor customers.
Are the other real estate sites so alligned?
Alignment is the question I hope to address and answer. I'll have something this afternoon. I need to arrange my thoughts on this but something about the Listing Sites is troubling me -- I think I know what it is, but I want to make sure I have looked at it properly.