Spending the last three months in its "quiet period" prior to launching its IPO, HouseValues is announcing the business plan it believes will make it a more worthy competitor against publicly-held competitors such as LendingTree and the privately-held HomeGain.

Instead of marketing leads on an exclusive basis to brokers like LT, and agents, like HG, HouseValues plans to target both.

Launching the "BrokerSelect Lead Network," the first membership network of its kind, HouseValues plans to offer both exclusive lead generation and lead management tools to brokers. Unlike its competitors, HouseValues does not charge a commission in a referral fee back-end format, but instead charges a monthly lead and lead management fee, allowing its members to keep "100 percent" of what they earn from the leads.

BrokerSelect network memberships are being offered to a limited number of leading brokers in each local market. Leads are priced according to the price of the home and the geographic area.

The advantage for brokers, of course, is that they can join the network and have a new revenue stream by passing the leads on to their agents for a referral fee.

"HouseValues already provides more than 10,000 real estate agents with the industry's top lead generation and lead management solution," said HouseValues' Chief Executive Officer Ian Morris. "BrokerSelect expands upon our focus of making real estate professionals more successful by providing market-leading brokerage companies with the tools they need to grow their business while making their agents more successful."

The BrokerSelect network already includes over 20 of the industry's most respected independent and franchised brokerage firms, including Coldwell Banker United, Prudential Fox & Roach, Coldwell Banker Canada, ZipRealty and Weichert Realtors, says HouseValues.

So why hasn't HouseValues targeted brokers before? "We just started offering this program and working with pilot customers, which you can see from our list are big players, so it wasn't available until the second half of 2004. We found brokers want to get in and now we are announcing the product's availability."

The product wasn't ready for prime time until the company could establish some true points of differentiation from its competitors. "This is unique from what anyone else is doing," says Morris. "This is a flat service fee working with a limited number of brokers so we can provide the lead to one and only one broker in the area, and we provide them with lead management tools. We provide access to training, coaching, dedicated account management, so it is a bundled service. They build their business around it and keep everything they earn. It is a monthly service relationship, and pricing is depending on number of leads and geographic area and bundled into a comprehensive service."

"The BrokerSelect Lead Network is a valuable component of our business development strategy," said Bret Violette, President of Weichert Lead Network. "In addition to the exclusive buyer and seller leads we receive, we have also uploaded tens of thousands of prospects from a segment of our own database to take advantage of the automated and customized marketing campaigns in the BrokerSelect lead management system."

According to the company, the BrokerSelect Lead Network advantages include:

• Exclusive home buyer and seller leads that provide a new source of business for the nation's leading brokerage companies

• Automated and customizable follow-up marketing campaigns that keep the brokerage brand in front of prospects, customers and past clients

• Dedicated training and account management to assure the success of every brokerage customer

• Sophisticated tools that enable brokers and agents to easily integrate leads from their Web sites and systems directly into the lead management system

"The key for us is the flat fee," says Morris. "It lets real estate professionals keep what they earn, and that tends to attract the best real estate professionals - the people who are confident they can close business.