Interview: Damon Pace - HomeHugg.Com

Damon Pace, CEO of Incredible Agent wants consumers, Realtors and lenders to show the love. Pace has recently unveiled a new web effort entitled HomeHugg. The premise of the site is similar to popular social news and bookmarking sites like Digg and Netscape.Com.

"HomeHugg is very much like the social bookmarking communities that have gained momentum over the past year. Their popularity is based in discovering and sharing similar interests. HomeHugg members can share information and opinions with one another in order to identify the homes that meet their search criteria."

We asked Damon to answer a few questions regarding HomeHugg and he graciously accepted.

Q: Your web site states, "HomeHugg is a community of Home Buyers, Realtors and Lenders that help each other discover, save and share their favorite homes for sale or rent in their community." Can you explain individually, how Buyers, Realtors and Lenders can use your site and what the benefit is?

A:First, HomeHugg helps home buyers by allowing them to simply search any real estate website they want and save that home listing to their HomeHugg account. Once they save it to their account, other home shoppers may find that home and then save it to their account as well. With HomeHugg, the more members who like a home, the more exposure the home receives on our site. Which brings me to my second point. When a Realtor has a listing posted on their website and that listing becomes a popular home on HomeHugg, there will in turn be more targeted home buyers driven to the Realtors website to learn more about the home and possibly become a lead. Don't forget they also get paid when that listing sells. HomeHugg will be promoting that listing for them and hopefully it will sell faster because of the number of huggs it recieves. So essentially, Realtors are able to promote their clients' listings and drive traffic to their website at the same time. With HomeHugg, Lenders can play an important roll by promoting listings for Realtors, leaving comments on homes and therefore bringing exposure to themselves to build their business. We will also be rolling out other tools in the future to help Lenders become a larger part of the HomeHugg community. We believe Lenders play a significant, yet untapped roll in the online real estate marketplace.

Q: Do you plan to monetize HomeHugg in the future, if so, how?

A: Yes, we plan on monetizing HomeHugg someday. How? There are many different ways we are kicking around to help us monetize HomeHugg. For the moment, we simply want home buyers to use the site and Realtors to promote their listings as much as possible. Also, at Incredible Agent we have many different products that we currently monetize to help real estate agents. In other words, we're not dependent upon HomeHugg being enormously profitable in order to keep HomeHugg up and running. Obviously profitability is our goal, but we already offer great products to the real estate community and therefore have no investors to answer to other than ourselves.

Q: Explain the process for a Realtor to include a listing in HomeHugg

A: This is a very simple process. All a Realtor needs to do is visit http://www.homehugg.com/huggme/ and copy the html for their favorite "hugg me" link. From there they simply add that line of code to each of the listings on their website. Once that's done they can click on the "hugg me" link on each of their listings and insert the basic home information onto HomeHugg. Now that the listing is on HomeHugg, the other community members will find the home, visit the Realtors website and decide whether they want to hugg the home or not. It's that simple. We hope to make the process even easier as we develop the site out of Beta. Especially for our Realtor friends.

Q: Do you have plans to accept bulk uploads of listings from brokers and large agent teams?

A: Yes, we will be developing a seperate set of tools just for brokers and Realtors. Our community is rooted in helping Realtors find ways to communicate with the home buyers and promote their listings. There will be several different ways for Realtors to highlight their skills and services to our members. Bulk uploads of their listings is only one of those ways.

Q: How does HomeHugg integrate with other Incredible Agent offerings?

A:Ultimately, Incredible Agent is about utilizing Real Estate technology to help agents get more leads and sell more homes. We offer everything from real estate websites and lead generation to blogging and training. We believe in order to be truly Incredible on the Internet you need to integrate all the tools and opportunities available into your real estate business. HomeHugg will be a part of our overall solution by helping our agents market themselves to home buyers, sell their clients listings faster and drive traffic to their websites to in turn get more clients.

Q: What do you think the reaction will be from the Realtor community regarding a consumer's ability to actively comment on a listing?

A: I've thought about this subject for a long time. We also run another website called http://www.IncredibleAgents.com (with an "S" at the end). It is our real estate agent review website that allows consumers to leave reviews for Realtors. We've noticed the majority of the reviews have been positive. Some of them are from agents directing their clients to the site and some have just found their agent and left a review. I firmly believe the same thing will go for home reviews as well. I realize it may be somewhat controversial for people to leave comments, but who says those comments have to be negative? As a Realtor selling a home, why can't you have the home owners go to HomeHugg and leave their comments about the home? What about neighbors or friends of the home owners who are familiar with the home and neighborhood? Why do we automatically assume that comments will always be negative? Why can't we be proactive and use positive comments to help sell the home?

The truth of the matter is that we have to think about ourselves differently when it comes to the Internet. We are only at the beginning stages of the "Recommendation Economy". It used to be that you could live anonymously and run your business with very few consequences to your actions. Today, anyone can say anything they want about you or the product you're selling and share that with the rest of the world. Think of it this way...Realtors and Homes are the equivalent of politicians and movie stars; the Internet is just one big paparazzi. They get to say and do anything they want. My point is that we've lost control over our Internet personas, so do everything you can to make sure you beat the papparazzi to the punch and manage your image appropriately. This goes for everything you care about, including your personal reputation, your business and the homes you're selling.

Ultimately, the real estate community may initially be bothered by leaving comments, but soon they'll begin to see it as an opportunity more than a problem.

Q: How many listings do you think it will take for you to consider HomeHugg a success?

A: That's actually a very tough question. To be honest, I haven't thought of it in terms of quantity yet. I guess the real success of HomeHugg will not be measured in how many listings are on the site, but rather in how many home buyers are using the community for their home search. It's very similar to the whole chicken or the egg question. What comes first, the listings or the home buyers? I believe if the buyers are there, the listings will come next. The interesting aspect of HomeHugg is that home buyers can add listings to the site as well as Realtors. It's the first site to allow anyone to add a home listing without actually being a Realtor or Broker. The whole premise behind HomeHugg is for it's members to add listings for other members to find, not to only search for listings on the market. Therefore I believe the number of active home buyers will be our measuring stick, not the home listings themselves.