RealTown's RealTalk

I second that, Homegain really wasn't worth the trouble.  We never received any leads that were worth anything.

Regards,

Michelle

My assistant forwarded this e-mail to me because this statement is just not true! I have been with HomeGain since its inception, and we have never required any type of 'contract' on any of our 3 products: Source4Sellers, BuyerLink or Agent Evaluator. An agent can cancel at any time. In fact, we offer free trial periods and upfront training before an agent pays their 'hard-earned' money. We do require a 30-day cancellation notice in writing. During this time, an agent will contiue to receive leads until the membership expires at the end of the 30 days.

Janice RidgeManager

Client ServicesHomeGain.com

In fairness to HomeGain (and any other lead generation company), it is really critical to measure the leads they send you apart from any other leads you gain on your own. The only way to do that is to create a Landing Page for your website specifically welcoming visitors you receive from HomeGain's channels. Once you create this page, instruct HomeGain to use that page as your Landing Page. The page can look very similar to your own homepage, however the only way someone should be able to find it is by clicking through HomeGain. The page should be an orphan page, that only contains links out, not in (even from your own site - don't list it on your sitemap!). You'll also need to instruct the search engines to not crawl that page in your robots.txt file on your site's server. Be sure you have some tracking code (such as www.StatCounter.com) placed within the code of that page, so you can measure the incoming traffic.

I gotta tell you, the initial training seminar HomeGain provides when you initially get on board with them is very informative and helpful. I gained a few insights that I hadn't considered, and learned from it.

Bottom line, and this is just my opinion: If your site is very good at converting leads on it's own, you will do very well with HomeGain as a supplemental lead generation tool. If however you can't seem to convert the leads you get on your own, you'll likely find the same success percentage with the leads HomeGain sends you. It is ALL in your hands, on how you present your website to any traffic you receive, regardless of where it comes from.

I found HomeGain easy to work with. I did at one point have a Rep that I wasn't comfortable with, but asked for a different rep and things were fine again. I never felt HomeGain was dishonest or deceptive, after all - their success comes from your success.

Steve Busse CRS, GRI, CLHMS

Broker/vice-President Keller Williams Gulf Coast