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LIVE COVERAGE AND INFORMATIVE INTERVIEWS FROM BROKERIPTV.COM

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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 in Headlines, Lead Generation, Inman Real Estate Connect

BrokerIPTV: We are on the vendor floor of Inman's Real Estate Connect in San Francisco 2008 and I am pleased to be here with Brian Bowman and Brian is with Reply and Brian, welcome to the show.

Brian Bowman: Thank you Mark. Appreciate it.

BrokerIPTV: Just curious, what is... there is a lot of lead gen products here. You have seen one, you have seen them all. You got people paying for leads on Google. What is different about Reply?

Brian Bowman: So, the key difference of what we are doing today is we believe lead gen 1.0 is either data dying that it is time that the buyers of leads get control similar to buying a click on Google. You can now buy a lead. You can set up campaign that allow you to buy more of what works and stop what doesn't. So, an example would be a real estate agent in Santa Monica can say I only want to buy a home for 750000 dollars to a million dollars. I only want the consumer who is three days old or younger in terms of when they submitted the lead and I want a star rating of three or higher. Those kind of controls didn't exist in the past and by the way, I only want to spend 20 bucks for that lead. So, can you do that for me? And with this type of a system, they can.

BrokerIPTV: So, how do you disseminate the leads that say that people aren't willing to buy or work [Phonetic] or what happens to those leads? Or is there a buyer for every lead out there?

Brian Bowman: One of the big ideas here is every real estate company that generates leads has some left over inventory. So, we have an exchange that allows people to submit the leads that are unsold. We are very transparent about how old those leads are or brokerages that have call centers, they can buy leads very inexpensively that maybe 15 days old or 30 days old and then call on those leads and try and get them back in, it would be fresh[phonetic]. Now, if they are older than 30 days, they just stop being used.

BrokerIPTV: So, do you guys have a property database so that people search. Is that in there for people that are looking for homes?

Brian Bowman: We do. Actually, we are getting the data from Oodle right now. So, we have nation wide, call it a MLS list, but the nice thing about that particular style is when a consumer clicks on a listing they actually go to the brokers website. So, by the time they make it into the site, we've generated the lead for them, we've distributed to the active agents in our market, we then want to fulfill the value proposition, the reason they clicked on that ad on Google on the first place.

BrokerIPTV: So, any success stories for some of your users out there Brian?

Brian Bowman: Sure. I think real estate agents have the opportunity now for the first time to think about marketing in terms of performance based marketing and expect around 1-2% close ratio, set up their effective CPMs or set up their portfolio of acquisition that works for them and we have many people in our broker market now that are finding good success in this new model.

BrokerIPTV: Well, thank you Brian for sharing your product with us today at Inman. Appreciate it.

Brian Bowman: Thanks

Posted in Headlines, Lead Generation, Inman Real Estate Connect

BrokerIPTV: We are at Brad Inman's Real Estate Connect 2008 in San Francisco and I am with Salvo[Phonetic] from HomeGain and welcome Salvo[Phonetic].

Salvatore Giammarresi: Hi. How are you doing today?

BrokerIPTV: I am doing great. I see you saw your partner in crime up there.

Salvatore Giammarresi: Louis... famous Louis. Where is Louis?

BrokerIPTV: Well, I think we found Louis and we found him on stage [Inaudible].

Salvatore Giammarresi: He had a great talk today.

BrokerIPTV: Yeah. Any comments you want to add on to what Louis had to say about HomeGain in general that you can share with our viewers?

Salvatore Giammarresi: Well, I think he outlined well what we will be doing. We are trying to go beyond what we have been offering, giving more information, blog, bio, more exposure basically to the agents.

BrokerIPTV: Yeah, I know. Louis was... you know... I mean the bottom line you guys are based on getting results for the brokers that pay to use your service, end of story.

Salvatore Giammarresi: That's true. However, we understand that we cannot just speak with the agents. We have to speak with the consumers also. So, we are trying to bridge that. Bring consumers together with agents.

BrokerIPTV: Yeah, right, that was part of what he was talking about is the fact that the only you are going to hook up an agent with a consumer is to... you have to really keep the consumer in mind and build the site to their needs, so that you can get married up with a real estate broker.

Salvatore Giammarresi: Yeah, that's correct. I mean I think HomeGain before I was on board was connected primarily with agents. We were focusing only on agents that we kind of forgot that agents without someone who wants to sell or wants to buy a home doesn't do anything. So, we are trying to realign ourselves now and still continuing with the agents, but now keeping in mind SEO benefits, blogging, all of those new technologies that are out there that are going to help... actually help the agent.

BrokerIPTV: Salvo anything in the future that HomeGain has down the horizon, the planning for the brokers and the community?

Salvatore Giammarresi: Well, there is one new release that is coming out on August 5th. I can't say too much about it, but it is going to basically reposition HomeGain and... so, that's coming out and then we have a few new releases. One other big one end of August, which is going to up our SEO value and my team is developing new offerings, new circulations and actually I am open always to feedback from agents.

BrokerIPTV: Great. Well, Salvo[Phonetic] we really appreciate your thoughts and opinions and look forward to seeing those releases in August. Thank you.

Salvatore Giammarresi: Thank you very much. Bye.

Posted in Headlines, Lead Generation, Inman Real Estate Connect