HouseValues nominated for two Inman Innovator awards

HomePages.com has been nominated for “most innovative Web service," and The Loan Page for “most innovative mortgage company or service."

Winners will be announced at the Real Estate Connect conference next month.

Online real estate ad spending accelerates

Borrell Associates, a research and consulting firm focused on classified spending, reported today that online real estate advertising grew from 10.3% of overall real estate marketing spend in 2004 to 14.7% in 2005 - a 43% increase. Online spending is now expected to reach 32.1% of real estate marketing dollars in 2010, eclipsing the amount spent on newspapers (which will shrink to 30.4% in 2010).

Total real estate ad spend by the real estate industry was $11.7 billion in 2005, and is expected to shrink to $9.6 billion in 2010, according to Borrell. But 32.1% of that pie is still more than $3 billion dollars expected to be spent by real estate agents online in just four years.

That's amazing, but clearly backed by the accelerating growth Borrell is already seeing across the industry.

Borrell's report this morning is full of fascinating insights. We'll blog more of them here in the coming days.

Podcasting the Masterminds

A mere six months after dipping our toes into the blogosphere, HouseValues is joining the Podcast Universe! Or, at least we're testing said universe...

In an effort to share the success of our customers with the world, we're starting to podcast our twice-monthly Mastermind Calls with top-producing HouseValues agents. These are really fantastic calls, often summarized via a short transcript on Claudia's AgentCEO blog, but are really worth listening to as they appeared live on the day of the call. You can really hear the passion in the voices of our agents.

Give them a shot by clicking on the link below. This will give you the XML feed so that you can not only listen to currently-podcasted calls, but also find out when new calls are posted.

Click Here:


If you want to make keeping up with this blog and our Podcasts even easier, sign up for an RSS reader and have the work done for you!

Racing for a good cause

More than 50 HouseValues employees participated yesterday in the Fred Hutchinson Shore Run, an annual running & walking event that generates much-needed funding for cancer research.

Each of the HouseValues participants were decked out in beautiful bright-orange HomePages t-shirts, and two even finished in the top 30. Impressive!

Joining HouseValues runners and walkers on foot were several on water as well, manning three boats carrying HomePages.com banners along the course (which hugged the western shore of Lake Washington). One such boat with its happy crew is pictured here.

It was a beautiful Sunday morning, and a great event.

HouseValues featured in Mortgage Banking Magazine cover story

The cover story of June's issue of Mortgage Banking Magazine, one of the most well-respected magazines in the mortgage industry, featured a lengthy section on HouseValues - including a long interview with VP of Mortgage Kevin Akeroyd.

The story features several of HouseValues' products for mortgage brokers and enterprise banks alike, including opportunities for real estate agents to get matched with a top mortgage broker partner in their area.

The issue is on newsstands now, and will also be available throughout this weekend's National Association of Mortgage Brokers Annual Conference in Philadelphia.

HomePages Heats Up

Traffic at HomePages is really heating up. We reported last week that traffic to the full HouseValues network of sites exceeded two million unique visitors in May, but a closer look at HomePages traffic specifically shows just how dramatically traffic has grown on the new site in the past three months.

Between March and May 2006, according to Nielsen NetRatings, traffic to HomePages increased almost six-fold, thanks to aggressive television and online advertising, as well as growing buzz in the media. Thanks in part to the dramatic HomePages growth, traffic to our network of consumers sites is up 64 percent in the same period.

The big winners of this growth? Our customers. In May, thanks to more than one million consumers visiting HomePages across the country, real estate agents generated broad awareness and traffic for themselves and their listings. The stories of agents winning listing presentations and more business thanks to HomePages continue to pile up!

More than two million consumers in May

Traffic statistics for the online real estate category are in, and it was a great month for HouseValues.

According to Neilsen NetRatings, our network of consumer Web sites (which includes HomePages.com, HouseValues.com, JustListed.com and TheLoanPage.com) hosted more than two million unique users for May - a new record for us. In fact, traffic was up more than 60% from April to May this year.

Leading the charge was HomePages, which saw consumer traffic more than double from April to May. Awareness and buzz for HomePages is higher than ever - thanks to an ever-present television and online marketing strategy that has us all over MSNBC, in Newsweek, Business Week, Money Magazine and more.

Things are heating up...

HouseValues Welcomes the Governor

This afternoon, Washington State Governor Chris Gregoire visited our Yakima office and was the primary speaker at an open house celebrating the success of the HouseValues employees in Yakima.

In just five months, we have grown to more than 60 employees in Yakima while we continue hiring in Kirkland. Our team in Yakima is making incredible progress and doing an outstanding job of representing HouseValues to real estate professionals across North America. It was exciting to have the Governor at our Yakima location to see that progress first-hand and praise the positive impact employees in Yakima and Kirkland are having on the economic growth in Washington State.