HomeGain BuyerLink, YOU'RE FIRED!

Search Engine SPAM with a Million Dollar Budget

HomeGain, HouseValues, Homes.com etc. are all the top search engine results on Google for just about any <city name> real estate. These companies spend big dollars to make sure they they stay at the top of Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. It is almost impossible for sites with valuable content to place well in the search results because the million dollar equivalent of SPAM is clogging up the search results. This prevents consumers from easily getting the information they are looking for and puts up unnecessary walls between service providers and consumers.

HomeGain Buyer Link

One of the more potentially misleading lead schemes is HomeGain's Buyer Link. HomeGain BuyerLink is a program where HomeGain redirects website traffic from their website to real estate agent websites for a pay-per-click fee. The HomeGain site shows up at the top of Google and advertises it's self as a one stop resource for real estate consumers where they can search for homes and find information about listing their home for sale. The truth is, the site has very little original content of their own, the site uses what could be considered misleading techniques to draw in the consumer The only local content they have is the real estate agent websites they send consumers to for a fee.

Consumers want to look for homes on the internet. The HomeGain site advertises that you can search for homes. Consumers click on the search for homes button, then they click on their state, then their county, and finally they click on the town they are interested in. Suddenly, the consumer finds themselve on a completely different website, a real estate agent's IDX search page.

How can the consumer not help but feel deceived at this point? HomeGain shows up in Google (who is supposed to have the most relevant search results) and they navigate through HomeGain's site thinking that HomeGain will allow them to search for homes. Instead they are redirected to a real estate agent's site that they should have been able to go to directly from Google had HomeGain not been there clogging up the search results. This is nothing short of SPAM. HomeGain has no content of their own. They are hijacking the real estate agent's website content and listing search functions and selling them back to agents at $0.75 - $1.50 per click.

What Consumers Can Do

Look for sites with LOCAL content. The lead selling companies spend lots of money to trick you into using their sites. Once they have you on their website they turn around and sell your information to real estate agents. This makes the cost of doing business go up for everyone and puts the consumer in the position of not being able to easily find good local content and information about real estate. Instead they get stuck in a link maze that eventually leads to someone who paid for the traffic. Look a little deeper in the search results to find valuable local sites that won't sell your information to the highest bidder.

What Real Estate Agents Can Do

Stop using the Lead Sellers and Middlemen immediately. You are hurting yourself and hurting your customers when you give these companies money. Middleman companies with million dollar budgets will do nothing but drive up the cost of buying and selling real estate and make buying and selling real estate more stressful and confusing for the customer. Do not feed into their business model. It may be nice in the short term if you are getting decent leads from these sources but I hope that you are in this business for the long term. If these companies keep getting bigger it will be almost impossible for individual agents and small brokerages to do business on the internet.

It is time to put the middlemen and lead sellers out of business.

Posted by Don Paradis on 12/23/2006 09:12 AM

Comments (31)

homegain, lead sellers, housevalues, lendingtreee, homescom

31 Comments on HomeGain BuyerLink, YOU'RE FIRED!

DEC

2006

THank you for your insight! I completely agree with you on lead generation companies and I didn't realize that homegain operated in that manner!

I think that internet lead generation sites should have valid real estate licenses for each state they "practice" real estate in, including Zillow.

Outstanding information. Like Renee, I didn't know that HomeGain worked this way. Your point on ...

"They are hijacking the real estate agent's website content and listing search functions and selling them back to agents at $0.75 - $1.50 per click."

is valuable insight. I've never used, nor do I plan to use, these "lead generators" inspite of all the telemarketing calls I get from them.

Another thing to stop doing is pointing links to directory sites. Many will offer a discounted fee or a free link for a reciprocal link. All the incoming links help directories to bypass agent sites in organic searches.

Yep.

Search for "real estate montgomery county maryland" and you'll see two of my sites at the top, AFTER Realtor.com. I don't really appreciate that one either. Then comes homes.com, homegain.com, etc., etc.

I worked my heart out to stay at the top of the search engines and I do it with content. But, Homegain.com has 741,000 backlinks. It's going to be up there.

I've beencursing these dang companies since they first went online.

Lenn

Amen Don, I have always felt this way and I have always felt that all they want to do is cash in at our expense. The more that the agents feed into these the more that will pop up.

Great post. Thanks Jay

After the most unpleasant experience with HouseValues.com, I will never attempt to purchase a lead again. When I even hear their name I just want to cringe. Leeches, all of them.

I agree with Lenn,

It's almost impossible to keep up with a company that can pay full-time employees to do nothing but build backlinks. I just don't have the time.

Great article Don. Didn't know about homegains tactic either.

I am not for sure I understand why this middleman hurts customers.

How many times have you purchased a vehicle directly from GM and not from a local dealer?

How about buying your electronics directly from Sony and not from Best Buy?

I agree, I don't like Homegain, but to decide it hurts customers in finding information, I am not for sure it does.

We wish you a merry Christmas! We wish you a merry Christmas! We wish you a merry Christmas And a happy New Year! Glad tidings we bring To you and your kin! Glad tidings for Christmas And a happy New Year!

Broker Bryant and The Lovely Wife (pretend we are singing it works better like that) ROAR!

Craig,

What if you to buy a car from a Ford Dealer you had to go to a website called "FordGain" that captured your information and then sold it to your local dealer? What if you couldn't find the car dealerships directly because Google or the Yellow pages was filled with listings for FordMiddleMan.com and FordLeadReseller.com?

When you finally get to the dealership who is going to get a better price on the car, the person who found the dealership directly or the one who got tricked by going through the middleman?

What if you tried to find a place to buy your Sony stereo and the first results in Google were SonyGain, SonyValues etc. and these websites captured your information and then sent you to BestBuy after charging a 30% referral fee when you bought the stereo? Do you think you'll get the best price on the stereo?

What do these fees do to the cost of providing services to buyers and sellers? They make the cost go up. What value do the middlemen add to the transaction? None. What benefit do the give to the consumers? None.

Thanks Craig for having a moment of clarity. Clearly there's a misconception about the BuyerLink product and what it does and doesn't do. The 'top' of the rankings at Google or any of the other engines are not sacred ground reserved for Realtors® with relevant content to extract consumer searches and convert these to personal income. HomeGain, and others like them, get traffic because they do what it takes to get traffic-- and they do it more efficiently than most individuals can do for themselves. Lenn and other Realtors® do a great job of managing their online activities to stay up top but other agents simply don't have the time or don't have the expertise to take this on as a personal task for themselves. That's why they get it from a 'professional provider' who can.... BuyerLink is the only product out there of its kind where all you have to do is decide what city and how much you want. HomeGain administers the keyword activities to "get" and deliver you the traffic and charges you for just those that actually visit your site. They do it for a fee, true, but they're still just providing a service to those that can't or won't provide it for themselves-- much as I no longer am willing to change my own oil-- even though I still know how.

Great post...Thanks for getting your message out to the network...

What are we besides middlemen? Do we, as agents, have a product to sell? We do what we do best, which is to market properties. Every FSBO has, in the past, thought we were middlemen too. I will happily continue to pay HomeGain. When people want content for my local area they get switched to my website. My first month with HomeGain BuyerLink I spent just over $500 and had over 12K of commissions come in from it.

I happily pay referral fees for just sending me a client as well. Another middleman...

My full time job is real estate. Can the FSBO sell the house himself? Perhaps... Can I optimize myself? Not as well as HomeGain.

A middleman hurts the consumer if they add cost to the transaction without adding any real value for the consumer. I don't know what these companies do because they don't operate in my area but "lead" companies that simply troll the internet to sell leads to agents don't really bring much to the table for the consumer, in my opinion.

Ultimately, it's the users of the search engines who decide where they click and it's up to businesses to compete effectively for those searches. Homegain is one of many companies who understand that paid listings management (PPC) is a science and invests (not just dollars) in it as such. Local realtors have an advantage that can be used to get a better click rate than Homegain if they are inclined to get help or take interest in the science of paid placement, but languishing about big companies that beat up the helpless realtors is not going to improve conversions for local realtors. Living in the free market has it's price - we have to find ways to compete better online.

This is one of my hot-button issues. Thanks for bringing it up again, Don and for your intelligent reply to Craig. And, Chris, I am NOT a middleman. Who or what is standing between me and my client? I am not getting in the middle between any two parties. If a seller and a buyer want to deal with each other directly, the FSBO way, I am not making them pay me a fee for allowing them to do business with each other.

I am providing valuable services for buyers and sellers who hire me. The role of a traditional middleman is to provide a service, such as a distributor who gets/buys from the manufacturer and ships/sells the goods to a retail store who then sells to the consumer. The internet has in some cases shortened traditional supply chains.

In real estate, just the opposite has happened. The HomeGain and HouseValue types did not exist before the internet. They are not middleman in the traditional sense of a supply chain but rather like "busy bodies" shoving themselves between me and my prospective customer. They are only pretending to offer a service to the consumer holding themselves out as the experts. They pretend to know who is a "neighborhood specialist." They don't tell the consumer that this "neighborhood specialist" earned that label only because he/she has paid them good money to say so.

In the meantime, I am still doing battle with these "Leeches" on the internet for top positions with the search engines. It's getting more difficult but I'm not giving up. When I checked last I did pretty well. See my blog on "Stop working on your website and you could drop like a rock."

DEC

2006

I wish Google would make good on thier "anti-spam" promise and ban HomeGain from there search engine. There must be big $$$ involved under the table for this. Yahoo is 10 times worst though. At least google doesn't have it's own form of spam like Yahoo Real Estate.

Chris,

You make a great argument but the problem I see with HomeGain and all the other search engine SPAMMERS is they are the reason we all have to spend hours upon hours on SEO work. They are spending big dollars tricking the search engines into giving them top rankings. If it were not for them we could built normal sites (for humans instead of search engines) and still get ranked well.

It isn't a matter of choosing to change your own oil or going to the Quicky Lube. Changing your oil is a simple operation that just about anyone could do. It would be like if the car manufacturers conspired with Jiffy Lube to require that the engine be removed from a car and turned upside down to change the oil. Now, all of the sudden, only professional mechanics and hobbyists with extensive automotive knowledge, time, and expensive tools can change their oil.

We all need to stop feeding into these companies. It isn't a matter of convenience. The fact is if these companies didn't exist we could all have normal websites that consumers could easily find. There would be no need to perform SEO work and engineer sites for search engines instead of our customers. Lets put them out of business.

Gerhard, HomeGain is not preventing you from going directly to the client. I regularly work on my website, and I would love to get to a point where I don't need to pay for leads. I get direct leads on my website as well, but not nearly as many as with HomeGain. It doesn't prevent, it supplements.

Don, I see this as more a problem with the indexing of sites, not HomeGain, they are mearly capatalizing on the trend. If Google cut them out we could all be happy campers, in the meantime I will gladly pay for the extra traffic.

The posts from Chris Tesch have caught my eye - 12K return on 500 invested is a pretty healthy return for a month. Chris - do you have "numbers" for a longer period of time? I will be in touch. Not a replacement for SEO, but multiple revenue streams never hurt!

You are right, Chris, HomeGain is not preventing ME from going directly to my clients. What they ARE doing is telling the visitor on their home page: "Use HomeGain to find a top local real estate agent,..." They hold themselves out as the authority on real estate agents which they are not. This is not to say that there are no good real estate agents to be found on HomeGain such as yourself ;-)

Also, I have considered myself to augment my own lead generation with HomeGain and your ROI is making me reconsider it.

I have just begun to work with HomeGain and some connections with this service for a client. I am watching it closely to see how profitable it can all be.

I have seen a lead service connected to a freewheeling, freelancing 'mls' type service nearly all of the leads are sent to all of the paying members. That means the potential client/customer was 'bombed' by responses from real estate agents. Grisly. There was a set-up that if someone 'fell' into your individual website (designed by the service) YOU were the lucky one to get that lead and NO one else did. SEO was beyond your control because they ran the web hosting, design, etc. You only had some control at the dashboard level for working with your leads.

At least when the leads come into the HomeGain pipeline, they have come to that one specific website. And, the numbers connected to HomeGain are better than the ones from the freewheeler I worked with before.

It bites to pay, but everything costs. And I see little problem with a lot of working -- why have prejudice and hurt yourself!

DEC

2006

Don, I'm sorry but I have to comment on this again. Everybody needs to do there part in warning new agents not to participate in this garbage!

DEC

2006

Don,

Thanks for the post. The only leads I pay for are corporate referrals and they get paid when I get paid.

Its the consumers who are the ones that really lose out. These sites don't have any type of screening for the agents that use them either. -Charles

FEB

2007

Wow, this is certainly a hot topic! In principle, I agree that if all lead generation companies went away, the consumer would then have more direct access to local agent websites. Then I guess it would be a matter of which of the 2200 agents in my area had the best SEO capabilities as to who got the business. Would the consumer then be better served by this person or by the most knowledgeable Realtor with the most local knowledge and the best track record of finding the best home possible in the best locaiton possible at the best price possible? Reality check. While I really don't like having to spned money to get prospective homebuyer leads, I really, seriously don't think that the groundswell of incensed Realtors will EVER put a dent in these companies' business. Meanwhile, I have to put food on the table, and can't afford to be too idealistic. I closed 12 deals last year - 8 of which came dirctly or indirectly from a $250 a month investment with HomeGain BuyerLink. I would be out of business right now if I didn't have a source for leads! 4 came from 2005 leads, 2 from 2006 leads (not very good, really), and 2 came from referrals from 2005 leads. This means that you have to stay on a second year and follow up to have any success. It's a constant learning curve to learn how best to coax internet leads to contact you or harder still, to use you. Internet leads want quality information fast for free, to remain annonymous as possible and often feel that they really have no need for the Realtor providing the information.

APR

2007

OK guys and gals. Here'e the skinny -

I am here with the home office of Homes.com. I want to set some things straight about Pay Per Click (PPC) and/or buying ads. (WHY? Well, because most people think that this is the only way to generate a lot of traffic and leads from your website.)

PPC is very productive if it is done correctly and a very expensive waste of time if not. PPC does give you a lot of different prospects and an average of 30% closure, but for people that do not close right now, you have to have some sort of Drip marketing program to keep you fresh in their minds. Once you look at your ROI, you might have paid 10-20 dollars per lead at the end of all of it; which is excelent based on the national average cost of a lead ($80-$120 a lead). CLICK HERE for the blog on PPC that i did a week or so ago (I don't feel like typing it again, sorry.) We currently have a PPC program that we handle for you, but every dollar goes to the search engines based on the averge price for that day. Other programs have these types of things and you can also do it yourself. The difference comes from the amount of attention you give the account (or lack of).

BUYING LEADS IS USUALLY NEVER GOOD. Let me explain. I have a lot of clients that work with lead aggregators that charge them a commision split, large lead fee, small monthly fee or some other sort of membership costs. OK, that's fine. But guess what, most of my clients (I'd say 90%) are never happy. Yes that does mean that 10% ARE happy and making money. It does happen, just not often. I usually try to keep my clients away from it so that I don't get a dissapointed call months later.

End of story: if you have any questions, please feel free to email me or check out my website. No, I'm not going to try to sell you if you don't want the program... I just feel that there is so much speculation and ignorance about web advertisment all together.

Let me know what you think please.

MAR

2008

We pay MLS fees so we don't have to advertise our listings to the world ourselves.
We pay a printer so we don't have to take the time to print our own mailings.
We pay a post install company so we don't have to dig the holes for our signs.
We pay the post office/UPS/FedEx so we don't have to deliver documents ourselves.
and on and on and on. . .

Service providers do just that they provide a service.

I look at lead companies as a form of advertising. If I want to run an ad campaign I can either pay an advertising firm that negotiates rock bottom prices for ad space (because of their volume) or I can pay a higher price on my own. I can advertise on radio, TV, internet, and in newspapers myself to get leads or I can appear as a link on a major company's website that does the advertising for me.

However, I tried HouseValues/Just Listed and Real Estate Client Referals (RECR.com) and got quite a few leads that did not amount to anything. So if you use a lead company choose wisely

Anyone can take a REALTOR's money and offer some incentive or something for free to get people to sign up and give them their information. Those aren't real leads. They are just people that are agreeing to get some SPAM from some agent in exchange for something fivilous.

If the lead company doesn't get paid unless I do that makes sense to me.

The "Agent Evaluator" program that HomeGain has looks like it would make it easier for consumers to find local REALTORs and give them between 5 and 10 agents to choose from.
The agents that have something of value to offer (expertise, knowledge, sales skills, etc.) will have success because they will get chosen over the others.

There is only 10 slots in the top 10 search engine results.
You can pay for your own placement, pay an SEO company to place you there (and try to keep you there), or pay for leads from a company that is already there.

Either way the Internet is the first choice for 85% of home buyers.
Will buyers find you?

FEB

I no longer use Homegain and I feel a pinch in my pocket. Two years ago I spent $3600. with them and closed $2,000,000 worth of properties from the leads. Last year after taking a course with Mr. Internet, I followed up my leads with e-mails like he suggested and closed only $500,000 worth of properties. What a mistake. Then I also hired ProStep marketing to build me a new site and pay them to do the SEO. The site is fantastic but my leads and traffic have vanished. No sales from no leads. I for one will gladly pay .79 cents for a lead. Face it the scrapers are here to stay just like the FSBO's.

FEB

Lots of good historical references here. I think the key is to find what works for you and work the hell out it.

JUL

thanks for all the info. may try one of these out. Leads have dried up for me. no phone duty. so I might just try one of these. thanks for sharing.

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