The only thing that surprised me about the anonymous response from Gomez attacking Blanche Evans was that it wasn't written in all upper case - shouting their indignation to the world. I WAS pleased to see that in their own words Gomez has validated HomeSeekers as the most Realtor friendly site amongst the national aggregators. By their criteria HomeSeekers was lacking in sales data, agent role & responsibilites, payment policies (?), and home purchase explanations. Kudos to HomeSeekers. What Gomez does not understand is that each of these web sites owes their existence to Realtors and real estate practitioners. And HomeSeekers is the only one that truly appreciates that position. All of the above items are pieces of information that our customers would prefer the consumer acquire from them - not some anonymous 3rd party vendor. HomeSeekers has made its best efforts in trying to keep the Realtor at the beginning, center and end of the real estate transaction - rather than trying to supplant them like some of the higher Gomez-ranked sites. As to addresses being "missing" from HomeSeekers, again HomeSeekers is doing its duty to its content providers - the brokers and agents. If an MLS refuses to provide addresses HomeSeekers honors that refusal; or, as in our case, we allow our customers to decide if the address (or even the listing itself) is displayed on the Internet, HomeSeekers honors that selection. I have said it many times before and I will say it again, the total number of listings on a site is immaterial once you've achieved some critical mass - which has been reached by all the major sites. What IS important is that ALL the listings for a partuclar geographic region are available, and that they are updated on a daily basis. Here again HomeSeekers takes itself seriously and is the only site to update each and every day - including weekends and holidays. And by updating every day I mean that yesterday's activity is updated today. Some sites claim to update daily, but the data that they are updating with is weeks old. And Gomez continues to show its ignorance of the industry - citing RealEstate.com, Realty Executives and Yahoo as having more listings. Since RealEstate.com and Realty Executives get their listings from realtor.com, and Yahoo gets its feeds from many sources - CyberHomes being one of them, and by agents, brokers and homeowners adding their listings directly, you can't really count them as "aggregators". Thanks again to Gomez. I'm sure HomeSeekers will be using Gomez's findings in their marketing materials. Russ Bergeron SoCalMLS

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