Recently I announced a new guest author series entitled "What’s Your Internet Real Estate Marketing Strategy?"  The point of that series is to hear from Realtors® who are successful in their online marketing efforts but who have a view of Internet marketing that’s different from mine.

One of the ways it’s possible to be successful online that’s about as different as it can be from the way I do it is to use online lead reseller companies like HomeGain.com.  On Monday I’ll have an article that talks about how my own Internet marketing evolution is a response against a "lead reseller" agent in my office, and how I swung to the other extreme to become highly focused on Search Engine Optimization and content development.

With this in mind, this week I started looking into information about these companies and looking for Realtors® with an opinion on them one way or another.  Minnesota’s Josyln Panka sparked an excellent discussion, the comments of which serve as a sort of introduction to Realtor® opinions about HomeGain.  One commenter there, Nevada Broker, Sue Nelson, had some very positive things to say about her HomeGain results, so I stopped by and invited her to talk about her marketing strategy in our forthcoming series. Another person weighing in on this thread was Louis Cammarosano, HomeGain’s general manager.  Googling his name will bring you to all sorts of other interesting links about HomeGain versus Zillow.

Former HomeGain Sales Director Chris Hendricks defended HomeGain’s switch to a monthly-subscription model for its AgentEvaulator product by discussing an absolutely crucial element to successful online marketing — successful follow-up. 

Perhaps the best single source for discussion of HomeGain and other lead generation companies that I found was on Realtown.com’s Lead Generation Blog.  An excellent guide to who the players are is the "View by Vendor" blogroll on the left hand side, and the articles here are a good mix of criticisms of the Lead Generation companies and success stories.