Louis Cammarosano, General Manager at HomeGain, will be speaking on a panel at Inman Connect NYC tomorrow, Wednesday, January 7, at 10:30am EST.

He’ll be addressing a topic important to Realtors in today’s market, titled “Directing Your Ad Dollars Online”, and will be joined by co-panelists, Ginny Cain McMurtrie of Mediatise.com and Jill Harnick of Prudential Douglas Elliman.

Inman describes the conference session as: “The Internet has opened new doors to new advertising opportunities and many real estate brokers are slashing their ad spending. How best to redirect what’s left? Should you be buying leads, exploring sponsored listings or spending on Search Engine PPC ads? Find out in this intensive session.”

What are your thoughts on this topic? Ad plans for your business this year?

Mortgage rates have been very volatile this past month.  If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll note that the Fed is trying to drive fixed-rate conventional loans down to a 4.5% rate.  Last week, The Fed announced it would purchase mortgage-backed securities, in the open market, in order to drive down mortgage rates to 4.5%.

The preponderance of the Government intervention is being perceived as inflationary.  In short, investors believe that the Government has created so much money in the past eighteen months that it could render our currency as worthless as a Banana Republic.  This should drive mortgage rates much higher in 12-18 months. Continue reading this post

On December 30th Google updated its page rankings. According to Google “pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher Page Rank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search rankings“.

Google last updated its page rankings in February of 2008. Since then HomeGain launched the HomeGain Agent Blogging Network. In the latest Google page rank update, many HomeGain AgentView blogs scored page ranks of three and four! HomeGain AgentView blogs are also appearing at the top of Google search results for the key words “[city name] real estate blog”

The HomeGain Agent Blogging Network provides each AgentView subscriber with a blog, along with a place to post their profiles and listings in an exclusive and advertising free environment.   Upon launch of the HomeGain Agent Blogging Network, many were skeptical “Why pay for a blogging platform when you can set up your own word press blog for free?” The answer is page rank and higher placement in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

AgentView subscribers blogging on the HomeGain Agent Blogging Network benefit from HomeGain’s and the HomeGain Real Estate Blog’s high Google page ranking.

Here are a few examples of some highly ranked HomeGain AgentView blogs:

Continue reading this post

Yesterday I was perusing online through my cell phone bill.  I took note that my two teenagers ages 15 and 17 had sent and received over 10,000 text messages – in December.

The two adults in the home sent and received approximately 400 text messages this month -– mostly between the aforementioned teenaged children. Sometimes it seems like I text them more often than I talk to them.

This got me to wondering about the future of communicating in the real estate industry.

As I write this, I’m looking at an email inbox containing 5,586 messages. Lousy email management skills aside, this is an indication of how often I send and receive emails. As I look into my sent mail folder, I see that I have sent an average of 11.33 emails each day this month. These are emails sent from Continue reading this post

We are proud to introduce our next guest blogger, Russell Shaw.

Mr. Shaw, who hails from Phoenix,  generally needs no introduction as he has been recognized by the Wall Street Journal as one of the top 200 Real Estate Agents in the United States for numbers of units sold. (Mr. Shawn clocked in at number 25.)

Russell has a love for imparting his wisdom to fellow agents and is a contributor to the Agent Genius Blog.

We are delighted to welcome Russell to the list of HomeGain Guest Bloggers and look forward to his contributions here.

Stay tuned for Russell’s first post early in the new year.

I’d like to start out by saying that I’m honored to be here.  This is the first of what I hope will be many contributions to this great community. 

Apologies for beginning my stint here with a D.C.-centric theme but with January 20th rapidly approaching, we do feel like we’re the center of the universe.

I have a family friend, a young lawyer, who is now six months pregnant with her second child, who recently lost her job in New York City when her law firm folded.  She had very little warning and no severance pay.  Her husband works for Goldman Sachs.  I imagine that there are sleepless nights in that family.

Another friend worked for Lehman Brothers.  Before you picture her out on the street, it turns out that her entire division at Lehman was acquired by Barclays, so she is still gainfully employed.  But many of her closest friends lost their jobs and she reports that New York City has changed dramatically over the past few months.

Perhaps New York’s loss will be a gain for Washington D.C. and for the health of the D.C. real estate market.  According to The Washington Posts’ Steven Pearlstein, “The region should leverage the enthusiasm of the new generation of bright, young, ambitious people who will seek to come here. Continue reading this post