I for one wish the Trulias and Zillows a lot of success. As a consumer I love a model that provides me a ton of free information and professionals to interact with and where it's the professionals and businesses that advertise that pay for my free access to data.

As a consumer I have no use for homegain. There are some less tech savy souls that will continue to provide contact info for homegain to sell, but I believe that type of a lead gen model is slowly going away on the internet. Too much free information for a consumer to have to resort to giving away their contact info…

I meant: Brian,

What's the formula? Listings AND local content–which not one of those bigger companies can seem to overcome.

Content, good content, is phenomenally expensive. Those companies, many companies, in fact, have relied on blog content to give them an artificial boost with "quasi-content."

The consumer doesn't want "hit and miss" neighborhood content. I've never worried about Trulia or Zillow, nor R.com.

My info is better, my local info is better–heck MY SITE IS better.

Those sites that need the RE industry to survive are going to be hard-pressed to keep on keeping on in the next 18 months.

I think Realogy should be (by any logical assumption)going bankrupt or Chapter 11 or something, this year.

This is a phenomenal opportunity for the little guy to WIN BIG.

To participate in trulia voices consumers need to register

Homegain's instant homevaluation tool,home sale maximized tool agent blogs local information listings and agent profiles are all available without registration

Consumers want free information and agents want to meet them

Homegain has set up a meeting place where the attraction is the realtor not the free content

Our customer is the real estate professional not the advertiser and our content reflects that model

I for one wish the Trulias and Zillows a lot of success. As a consumer I love a model that provides me a ton of free information and professionals to interact with and where it's the professionals and businesses that advertise that pay for my free access to data.
As a consumer I have no use for homegain. There are some less tech savy souls that will continue to provide contact info for homegain to sell, but I believe that type of a lead gen model is slowly going away on the internet. Too much free information for a consumer to have to resort to giving away their contact info…

Zillow benefits and suffers from having had $87 million to spend.

Its allowed them to employ plenty of developers and perhaps endless brainstorming sessions with high priced employees.

They came up with a recycled home valuation tool, directly from the HomeGain vault and brilliantly repackaged it as a "Zestimate" , failing to understand fully why HomeGain abandoned it in the first place – it never made us a dime in its original form.

The challenge for Zillow now is while investors and bloggers cheered them in their free wheeling stage, the applause has died down and Zillow has to revert to more stunts like creating Zestimates of homes not for sale like the White House.

Having determined that traffic and PR were goals in and of themselves and not means to an end, a rethink of their business model might be difficult at this point.

BTW we at HomeGain remain militantly
focused on our customers' satisfaction, not journalists or bloggers opinion.