Louis's Blog

HomeGain's popular Home Sale Maximizer tool, that helps homesellers find out which home improvements (including home staging -indeed the tool was featured in Home Staging for Dummies!) will best increase their resale value, is now available in widget form to place on your web site.

There are three Home Sale Maximizer widgets to choose from. (shown below)

Click here to get the Home Sale Maximizer widget for your site.

 

  

 

 

The HomeGain Real Estate Blog, recently nominted for an Inman Innovator award turned one year old today!

There's some great content on it (check out "Are Foreclosures Affecting Home Values" and "A Blue Print for Surviving a Turbulent Market") and a new spooky header. 

Also don't forget to check out HomeGain.com too! (the spooky header there is animated!)

 

 

The HomeGain web site has been changed for the better!

The new HomeGain.com, designed to connect home buyers and home sellers with Realtors, now makes it easier for visitors to find real estate information and to connect with local Realtors quickly.

We've made the agent blogs, agent profiles and  agent listings more accessible with direct links to these sections from HomeGain.com.

Directly accessible from HomeGain.com is our instant homevaluation tool and the popular Home Sale Maximizer tool that helps home sellers determine which home improvement will provide the best return on investment.

Visitors to HomeGain.com can also find and compare Realtors with our Agent Evaluator product and can search MLS listings in the View Homes For Sale section.

Please take a look and let us know what you think.

Here is a very interesting and unique request made by independent candidate Ralph Nader in front of the U.S. Treasury yesterday:

Open Letter to Henry Paulson Video

In following the debate over the wall street bail out, and listening to the arguments, about Whether the bailout results in socialism and a abandonment of capitalism, it strikes me as neither. Capitalism and socialism are theories of how goods and services should flow through the system. Thus, a capitalist believes in the free markets and a socialist believes in some government control and regulation over the markets. A businessperson believes in only one thing - making money. Generally speaking, businessmen will favor the capitalist system. However if the capitalist system no longer proves able to provide profits, and indeed leads to losses, socialism will be favored. Witness Paulson’s views on the subject. As a banker at Goldman Sach, he favored capitalism. Now as secretary of the treasury will Goldman Sach in danger of failing, he favors the socialist propping up of the banking system that he once profited from. It seems that the United States is neither capitalist nor socialist, but a country of businesses. The current bailout supported by both Democrats and Republicans indicates a desire to protect those interests. The interests protected, however appear to help only the largest business interests as there does not seem to be anything in the bailout that helps small businesses like Realtors, who appear to still have the capitalist option of failing with out any prospect of a socialist bailout.

In following the current financial crisis, I am stunned at how corporate boards routinely passed excessive executive compensation packages.

A typical corp exec gets a signing bonus, high base salary, performance incentives, perks and a near guarantee that if it doesn't work out he/she (far more often he) willl get their golden parachute.

The argument we hear is "we must pay for talent". This is absurd -talent is unique, talent is Michael Jordan, Robert DiNiro or Leonard Bernstein.

Woudn't you think that before approving a CEO's compensation package for $20 million, a corporate board would owe a fiducuary duty  to ask a simple question:

"Is there any one else that could do this job for $10 million?"

 

Recently Inman News published its 100 Most Influential Real Estate Leaders of 2008.

According to Inman news "the people on the list embody leadership, innovation, ingenuity, power and persistence"

Representatives from Zillow  (Lloyd Frink and Richard Barton) Trulia (Peter Flynt and Sami Inkinen) Active Rain (Jonathan Washburn and Matt Heaton) and HomeGain (Louis Cammarosano) were mentioned.

Today, Global Edge, a UK based real estate site, published its "World's Most Powerful Property People - Top 100.

It noted these people "are powerful because they work for (or in many cases, helped to create) the most authoritative real estate websites in the world."

Again, representatives from Zillow (Diane Tuman), Trulia (Rudy Bachraty & Team) , Active Rain (Mulitple!) and HomeGain (Jessica Gopalakrishnan) were  noted.

I was delighted to see that individual bloggers Joel Burlselm of the Future of Real Estate Marketing and Jay Thompson of The Phoenix Real Estate Guy also made Global Edge's list.

Of course, Brad Inman was mentioned in Global Edge's list. Brad will be in London next week on the 16th at the Windmill in MayFair for a meet and greet with some of the top movers and shakers in the UK real estate market.

 

 

 

 

HomeGain is pleased to announce our 3^rd annual Agent Appreciation Campaign, which our special way to say thanks to our agent customers for their business each year. We appreciate and understand the value that realtors bring to our business and to the real estate transactions.

To read more about HomeGain's annual agent appreciation campaign click here to see the press release.

Thanks You!

 

 

Last night HomeGain launched an iphone application for our real estate blog. While the blog rendered just fine on mobile devices, the new iPhone application displays the HomeGain Real Estate Blog in the iPhone format. If you have an iPhone please check out the application. If not you can see a screen shot of it here.