LEADCRITIC

The dynamic duo of Jon Moises and Chris Meerschaert have recently joined the new and growing Sparkroom team. Chris and Jon who spent much of their time at Quicken Loans will now be bring their experience and know-how to Sparkroom. The analytics platform and the duo should be a very nice match and should prove to be very beneficial for Sparkroom and its clients.

“We are thrilled to add talented individuals with Chris and Jon’s depth of knowledge and experience to our team,” said Jamie McDonald, Sparkroom’s chief executive officer. “Their track record of success in the online lead generation industry is unparalleled and will help Sparkroom drive enormous value for our customers.”

In some respects, Jon and Chris’s time at Adchemy was fairly short lived. I personally questioned the value of bringing on that kind of talent into a lead generation company and the benefits it would bring. It may have been very beneficial and created a higher rate of renewals for Adchemy, but I speculate that this was not the case. The counseling, advice and direction from Chris and Jon will be much better received coming from a 3rd party company like Sparkroom than from a lead generation company.

The last thing I need to know, is there is some kind of two for one deal with these guys that I don’t know about and if so which one is the bonus gift?

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We are in a time of change.

Whether it is politically, socially or economically we are continually hearing the word “change”. Change is good. Change is actually really good when it is proactive. Its much tougher when it is reactive, however. Typically reactive change becomes hasty, unplanned and lacks direction. The path of reactive change is similar to the children’s game of follow the leader. Proactive change is calculated, discussed and usually blazes new trails for the competition. Proactive change, in many scenarios is also defined as innovation.

Many in the mortgage market are being reactive, which in many cases is good because it means you are changing, period. Your evolving to the demands of the market and your business. It doesn’t matter which side of the table you are on. If you are a lead generator or a lead buyer, more then likely you are changing or your business model is evolving.

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Back from the dead, Owen Raun of RMC Vanguard posted his first podcast in 3 months. According to the site he will be teaming up with Bill Rice to interview “Leaders in the Lead Generation Industry”. The first podcast in the series was an interview with LeadPoint CEO, Marc Diana and was quite interesting.The first few minutes involved getting to know Marc’s career history and once that was over with they actually got into some very good conversations about the health of the industry, competing exchanges, the death of Root Exchange, what it takes to be successful in this market and when we would begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

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If you didn’t know already it is LMS week here at LeadCritic where I cover everything “Lead Management”. I wish I put that much thought into, but I don’t. In any case it seems that the press releases from a few LMS companies have fallen in succession and have covered comparable topics. Yesterday, I covered the launch of Debt Soft in the Leads360 platform and today Kaleidico launched their Icosales 5.0.

According to their press release, they have taken the strategy of making Icosales usable by any sales staff rather then targeting a few specific verticals.

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While everyone and their mother is scrambling to diversify, yes mothers are diversify too, their tools, gadgets and resources are diversifying with them.

It was announced today that Leads360, who has been using much of their resources to first hire a number of quality people and second to diversify their focus outside of mortgage. There is no doubt that mortgage will always be their main focus, along with other companies that also have their roots firmly planted in the mortgage vertical, but they have made a nice move to make life a little easier for their current and future debt clients by integrating Prime Debt Soft.

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Bill Rice the founder of Kaleidico a Lead Management Software company has joined the MortgageLoan.com team. According to his LinkedIn profile he is now holding the role of Vice President of Content and Managing Editor at the lead generation company.

MortgageLoan.com which holds many high ranking organic search results for numerous mortgage related terms and who is major contributor to the LeadPoint exchange looks to be making a move to boost their already robust library of content. The concentration on content should be a no brainer for most, however most mortgage related keywords are very competitive and without 100’s of pages of content updated daily and the increased volume of inbound links via widgets and good content, they can be very hard to achieve.

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I am going to come clean from the outset and say that, “no,” I don’t have the stones to make the call that we have indeed hit a, “bottom,” in the housing market. But I have seen a couple of things lately that lead me to believe we are at least close.

One revelation that I had recently was that consumers may have finally moved on from hoping that we will again see the market conditions experienced during the ref-boom. This dawned on me after a conversation with a client who was having particular success with a mail campaign. They attributed that success to the timing of the drop in conjunction with Bush signing into action the Housing Bill. I don’t believe that there was any correlation because if there was, we would have likely seen inquiry volumes spike in the Internet lead gen industry. But things have remained relatively flat and I think this is a good sign.

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Tomorrow morning, Wednesday, the newly separated companies will begin  “when issued” trading under their new stock symbols.

Tree.com which includes LendingTree.com, RealEstate.com, Domania and iNest. This group will trade under the ticker symbol TREE. The new IAC will trade under the symbol IACI and will include Ask.com, Match.com, CitySearch, Evite, Gifts.com, ShoeBuy.com, ServiceMagic, Pronto, CollegeHumor, GarageGames, Zwinky and RushmoreDrive. Tickemaster and its partnering divisions will trade under TKTM and the Home Shopping Network and its partnering divisions will trade under HSNI.

This is a huge move for the new spin offs. IAC, TicketMaster and HSN will no longer be dragged down by the real estate group and could really thrive down the road. At the same time, Tree.com may be priced at a nice discount with most of their losses already baked into the price.

We will see what happens, it will be interesting to see what Tree.com does to diversify away from the suffering real estate market, if anything at all.

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There are new cowboys in town and they are taking no mercy on suffering consumers.

Word on the street is that many of the mortgage subprime cowboys who left the market over the last few years are starting to jump back into the industry through the newly popular loss mitigation vertical. The increased vulnerability of consumers suffering from the same adjustable loans many of these loan officers and brokers put them in has revealed further opportunity for the consciousless scammer to prey on.

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According to the Charlotte Business Journal LendingTree cut 25 more jobs this last week bring down the total to 950 employees.

The company began layoffs in May 2007 as the mortgage market all but imploded nationwide, starting with problems in the subprime sector. LendingTree and sister company RealEstate.com laid off 440 employees in that first round, 250 more workers in September and 220 in December.

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If you haven’t heard already, which I a sure most have, being that the following email went out last night to all Low.com and Affiliate Media Network partners and buyers, AMN has completed a purchase of low.com’s client base. Buyers you have just been sold, how does it feel?

Here is the email:

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