Thousands of real estate professionals descended upon the HomeGain booth to learn about HomeGain.

On Saturday and Sunday Mitch Ribak and Joe Ferrara participated in our “Meet the Experts” program.

Joe gave blogging tips to visitors to the HomeGain booth and Mitch talked about how to use HomeGain’s Buyerlink in connection with capturing and converting leads.

From Friday until Monday, Realtors lined up to win their own Max and to pick up a Max button.

We will have a complete report on NAR later this week.

Here is Max hanging around on Friday afternoon waiting for the show to begin!

What were your thoughts about the NAR Convention & Expo this year in Orlando, Florida?

Louis Cammarosano

This weekend at the NAR Expo 2008 in Orlando, Florida, you will have a chance to meet two of the stars from the HomeGain Blog AND from HomeGain’s Ask The Experts Live Real Estate Forum, in person — Mitch Ribak and Joseph Ferrara!

Visit the HomeGain booth #3231 on Saturday and Sunday to meet them and discuss business strategies.

From 10am-NOON on both days, Mitch Ribak of Tropical Realty in Suntree, FL, will be available to speak with you about strategies to improve how you capture leads, managing leads, and converting more leads into clients — on both agent and broker levels.  Mitch will spotlight BuyerLink as well as his successful products, 100 MPH Software and eHomes Realty Network.

From 2pm-4pm, Joseph Ferrara of Sellsius Real Estate Blog will give advice for how to build a successful real estate blog, promote yourself on social networking sites and increase your online presence.  Joseph was just named by Inman News as one of 25 Most Influential Real Estate Bloggers list for 2008.

Their time and advice is FREE to booth visitors so make sure to stop by and learn some valuable advice from two guys who really know their stuff!

Let us know you are coming by emailing me at blog@homegain.com.  Also, if you are a HomeGain customer who is planning to come by our booth, you can RSVP for your FREE GIFT now by emailing me in advance.

We look forward to seeing you there!

The 2008 Texas REALTORS® Convention and Trade Expo starts tomorrow in San Antonio, TX. HomeGain will be present for the kick off of the convention, exhibiting at booth #224 all day.

Stopping by our booth gives you a chance to win a free Max—every hour! As well as a Flip Ultra camcorder to help you showcase your business online.

We are featuring our new product, AgentView, and giving free demonstrations to show all the ways that it can showcase your business as a real estate professional.

Don’t by shy and come on by! The next shows we’ll be visiting are C.A.R. in Long Beach, CA, next month, followed by NAR Expo in Orlando, FL in November. Hope to see you at one of them!

What are your thoughts on your state Realtor association’s annual expos? Are you going to yours? Continue reading this post

I have noticed that in almost all sales – Real Estate is no exception – salespeople tend to have up and down cycles in their sales stream. Most just attribute this to luck but I think there is more to it than that. I think they work hard to create leads and then when they are working the leads they stop generating new ones.

This creates a cycle where leads are generated, then there are sales, then there’s a down period, and the cycle begins again. In my opinion, it is important to cut out the down periods by continually creating new leads and improving all systems.

It seems that the same type scenario occurs in all phases of our business. Whether we are working on leads, systems, or marketing. We get motivated and work hard to generate or improve and then we cycle into a sloppy phase.

So…my question is how do we stay motivated to continually improve our lead generation techniques, systems, marketing, etc.?

Here are some ideas to stay in the groove:

Continue reading this post

I had a great conversation today with a past executive officer of FAR and now part of NAR. He came to my office to check out our 100MPH Marketing Software and System and our eHomes Realty Network. He will be signing up his Brokerage to take advantage of our tools. Anyway, after I did my demo, we started talking about the Internet and what NAR is doing with regards to the Internet. It was a great conversation and I really can’t talk about most of what was said as I don’t have permission to do that.

However, since I started my soft marketing of my software and membership company, I have talked with many major players in our industry. They all have one thing in common…they don’t know anything about the Internet.

Here is what they are thinking at the National level. They are hearing that the more information you have on your website, the more chance you have of getting a customer. Our conversation was a lot more detailed of course, but this interesting to me. They believe they should be gearing up on a national level to offer a ton of products for real estate agents to put on their websites.

Unfortunately it appears that they are hearing what they should be doing from the wrong people…in my opinion of course!

So I asked him what he thought the purpose of a Realtors website should be. He answered the same answer I hear from so many. He said, “to provide as much information as possible”. I told him, that is what most agents think, which is why 99% or more don’t make any money from their websites.

I told him that the real purpose of a website, like any marketing, is to get leads and turn them into customers.

He was a little shocked by my answer Continue reading this post

After the dot.com bust it appeared the initial promise of the internet was vanquished and the naysayers were right, that only geeks were using the internet and that business on the web couldn’t be conducted for profit.

So much for naysayers. The internet is now used by every bubba, grandma and you-name-it around the world. The internet is fulfilling its promise and rapidly becoming a standard tool of business, advertising and communication.

The argument is over whether real estate agents should be using the internet to conduct business. I’m sure there are successful hold-outs, and it’s probably true that many agents don’t have a comprehensive internet plan to conduct business, but it’s now pretty much a no-brainer that the internet is the place to be for real estate business.

NAR is addressing the issue, agents are getting their own websites, brokerages are putting together plans and every conference, workshop and seminar has something to say about it.

Many of us are way beyond all that and our main concern is just how best to utilize all the possibilities now that we’re in the middle of it. For those just starting, I’d suggest catching up fast by reading blogs like Bloodhound, Agent Genius and, Continue reading this post