Louis Cammarosano gets consumers in touch with Realtors

BrokerIPTV: Welcome to Brad Inman's Real Estate Connect here in San Francisco. We are at the Palace Hotel. Last day of the event and we are here with Louis from...

Louis Cammarosano: HomeGain.

BrokerIPTV: HomeGain. Louis from HomeGain. See that is the... we want to brand Louis with that name because that is his email and...

Louis Cammarosano: [Inaudible].

BrokerIPTV: Yes. Louis, we saw you up there speaking. You were up with a pool of other innovators in the market and why don't you share a little bit with... what you were sharing with the crowd up there as far as what you are seeing the consumers do.

Louis Cammarosano: We are seeing consumers are more interested... less interested in filling out forms and more interested in interacting with agents and finding out the expertise of agents. So, we are working on creating a platform or consumer is going to really interact with agents if they choose and if they don't choose and they want to remain anonymous and send lead forms in... not anonymous, if they want to not interact direct with the agent at the time, they will fill out a lead form and then the agent will get back to them.

BrokerIPTV: So, you are saying something more community based, wiki based, blog based...

Louis Cammarosano: Yeah, we are seeing that. We are also working with our own agents. We have got a beta of the thing called HomeGain Nation[phonetic], which is on the Ning[phonetic] platform which allows our agents to share with each other tips about HomeGain or just tips in general about what is going on in the real estate market. As I mentioned that on the panel, HomeGain doesn't view itself as the expert or the place to go for real estate information. It views itself as... we view ourselves as the place to find a Realtor. So, everything we do is really to get consumers in touch with Realtors.

BrokerIPTV: How is your page... as far as page rank traffic, things of that nature, how are you competing with all the other sharks out there, Trulia, realtor.com?

Louis Cammarosano: We are still holding up and remember our business model isn't dependent on driving millions of visitors. Our business model is dependent upon driving traffic to agents. So, it doesn't do me any good to get five million visits if two million of them end up in advertisers hands because they don't have an agent to send them to. So, what we do at HomeGain is we try to get each visitor who comes to the site in the hands of a realtor. So, what we are working on now is increasing the percentage of visitors that come to HomeGain that end up with agents.

BrokerIPTV: Yeah, I guess I am still a little bit in a quandary on how so many sites you are going to make it when you are talking 30, 40, 80 million dollars and no revenues are being turned.

Louis Cammarosano: Yeah. I think the advertising model works if you are Yahoo and you have a 120 million visits, but at any given time there is only probably less than 10 million visits a month that are looking at real estate, because not everybody is in the real estate market. You fragment that market amongst 10 major players, the scale really isn't there to sell advertising. So, what you see other companies doing is trying to make the revenue from real estate agents. The problems that companies have when you try to make money off of an agent and also money off an advertiser, you have got inherent conflict because the real estate agent loves the exclusivity, they don't want to compete with an advertiser, they don't necessarily want to see Weight Watchers there next to their photo. They want to see their information. They want the visitor to think of them as the place to go for real estate information. They don't want to be a side show.

BrokerIPTV: Great Louis. Well, as always we appreciate your opinion. You are a great innovator and we hope to talk to you soon.

Louis Cammarosano: Sure. Thank you.

Posted on October 12, 2008 19:56:13 by Blog Author