house values new websites

[Morristown]

Hello,

Just thought I would post house values. com's supposed great leap forward for their clients.

Finance.Yahoo artical

"HouseValues (NasdaqGS:SOLD - News) today introduced a suite of web marketing tools specifically designed to help real estate professionals generate more business directly from the Internet. Yada yada yada

"The Market Leader Web Marketing Suite provides our real estate agent customers with the tools they need to engage their customers and capture more business from the Web," said Ian Morris, CEO of HouseValues. "These new tools make Web marketing easy, and keeps agents top of mind with their prospects and clients."

Yada yada yada

Artical at http:// biz.yahoo.com /iw/070424/0242870.html
Here is the site: www. homepages.com /jerryhollerbach /AgentHome.aspx

Are they full of it???

[RonnieG]

Are they full of it???

This seems to be a follow-on to their early 2006 HomePages.com offering, with a web page shell integrating some of the same lead capture and CRM tools they have had for years.

The basic issue is as it has been for a long time with their products. They really want to suck you into buying one or more of their leads subscriptions, because that's where they make their money. I did OK with their seller leads for a couple of years, until the market changed. Plus all of a sudden there were 30 other companies in the same space, all competing for the same leads. Eventually, agents caught on to the whole model they based their business on, as did consumers, and lead quality went downhill fast. And to top it all off, they had a very poor opt-in process, so Spamhaus and others started blocking their drip emails to the point of killing their effectiveness.

Their primary target market is agents who don't have the time, skills or initiative to build and maintain their own web sites and generate their own internet leads. That was me for my first couple of years, as I was learning real estate. But like I say, I managed to make good money for awhile with them, and I did learn how to better manage and nurture the internet leads I get from my PPC campaigns. Once I started generating more leads, and better quality leads, at a much lower cost per lead, I dropped them. I know of several active members in this forum who have had similar experiences with them.