My post on HomeGain (see HomeGain is AVM Also-Ran) stirred up some discussion – here is a recent email thread I had with Louis Cammarosano, HomeGain’s General Manager (which he graciously allowed me to reprint here):

Here is why we consistently rank ahead the media darling Zillow in terms of traffic and certainly in revenue- HG has ALL types of listings- new homes, MLS, foreclosure, agent listings -zillow has very few listings

Homescout.com our wholly owned listings site itself has over one million listings

- HG has instant free hval tool (the first original HVAL tool from seven years ago) and we give our visitors the opportunity to connect with a Realtor to get a free professional HVAL

- HG has an agent evaluator offering that allows consumers to compare Realtors anonymously – Agent evaluator.com, another one of our sites, according to Hitwise is also one of the fastest growing real estate sites.

- HG features a mortgage center and a moving center – Realtor.com doesn’t have one nor does zillow

We have over 300 partnerships driving traffic including Yahoo and USA Today and 170 of our owner CV’s online newspaper sites

HomeGain just turned eight years old and its taken us eight years to build up the partnerships, determine the best sources of leads and traffic and to build up an agent base in the thousands.

Homegain is profitable.

Agree or disagree?

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HomeGain launched a brand new automated valuation tool last week, it’s calling its Instant Home Valuation Tool. According to their press release, it’s “the descendant of the original instant Home Valuation Tool that HomeGain created over seven years ago.”

I’m not sure what the old Instant Home Valuation Tool did, but the new one is a fairly decent effort. Biggest plus, it returns your result very quickly. The database is positively snappy, making for a nice experience.

Overall however, I find the overall design kind of uninsipired (not a big fan of the red and green) and I can’t help but think the value range it returns (rather than a number) is kind of a cop out. A $40,000 or $50,000 spread doesn’t do me a whole lot of good if I’m really trying to assess the value of my house as an asset.

Of course the business model is it’s offering agents the opportunity to buy advertising on the site and be the exclusive ‘featured’ agent around the results – and presumably the recipient of all the leads, should any materialize.

But the real question is, is this too little, too late?

Zillow has all but wrapped up the home valuation games in the mind of the consumer – to Zillow your home is almost the same as FedEx’ng a package or Xeroxing an article (admittedly, the latter expression has fallen out of favor a bit of late).

Cyberhomes, Fidelity’s AVM tool, runs a close second. I had a chance to get a sneak peak at what the site is planning to do, at the C.A.R. meeting last week – and count me among the new believers. (A far cry from my initial review; see Cyberhomes AVM is a Total Joke).

I think Cyberhomes is poised for big things and I hope to write more about their product in the near future, but for the time being, if you’re interested in learning more about their strategy, I’d recommend reading Transparent Real Estate’s excellent series on the service.

The only other guy on the block, eppraisal.com has an interesting approach, but I haven’t seen it gain much traction in terms of consumer traffic (see Alexa traffic graph below) – also, it kept giving me error messages when I punched in my home address… not good.

HouseValues? Well, let’s not even get started on that dead model.

So, HomeGain getting into the game – does it mean anything? Well looking at the Alexa chart they still have a solid traffic ranking and it is certainly a more compelling feature than some of their other products (finding a Realtor, or clicking through to some random agent’s website) – but I doubt they’ll find much a niche trying to reposition themselves as a serious AVM site.

I think HomeGain is a little late to the party with this offering. What it may do is help keep some of their existing visitors hanging around just a little bit longer, but as far as getting new bodies I think they face a serious uphill slog.

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Homethinking, the Realtor review site, has relaunched today with a totally redesigned site. The biggest change on the site is that it now displays property listings (pulled from HomeGain) on a Yahoo! Maps mashup. But, frankly I find the new layout confusing and a little busy.

Unfortunately, the major problem is I’m not sure where to start first. There seems to be far to much information on their home page and it’s just plain confusing how to get started on your search. Having both the top search bar and now the map search gives the user far too many options right off the bat.

Once you dive in however, a search in your zip code pulls up a series of recently sold properties and highlights the first property’s agent. Clicking on any of the other properties reveals the respective agent’s contact information. Moving on to the agent’s profile page, the map also displays all their currently listed properties. This part of the new site is as slick as it ever was.

A nice touch is the inclusion of Altos Research’s real time pricing trends graphs on each neighborhood page. (BTW – Altos Research maintains an excellent blog as well) Are we seeing a new competitor to Zillow’s API emerging here?

I really like the idea of a map based Realtor search – but I think Homethinking’s new site falls critically short in the usability department in its current form. A few tweaks would be all that it would take to make this a winner.

I would move the map off the homepage and to a secondary position deeper in the site to make it look less like a primary navigation tool. In my opinion, the map interface is most successful when you’re viewing an individual agent’s profile, where you can get a great visual sense of how much activity they’re currently generating. Everywhere else, it’s more of a distraction than anything else.

In a similar vein, Redfin launched a redesign of their site this past week. One of the biggest changes is they’ve simplified their homepage along the Find, Buy, Sell theme- as well as offering some new options to contact their agents with questions.

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