I'm a Virtual Tour Provider and I'm Pissed Off at Realtor.com

I've been pissed off at Realtor.com for about two years now. Let's go back in time and maybe you can understand why. 

SETTING: Bart gets a phone call from a Coldwell Banker client in New York.

TJ: Hey Bart, this is TJ.

BART: Hey TJ what's up?

TJ: Not much, doing well. Hey I have a bunch of tours to link up to Realtor.com for free.

BART: What do you mean... FREE? We get charged $19.95 for every tour and as you know, we charge you $23 not $25 like the national guys sometimes do.

TJ: Oh, well I signed up for Showcase listings. Its a new service Realtor.com is offering and I paid them a little over $2,000 to have Showcase listings for the whole year. They said you'd hook my tours up for free.

BART: Oh they did, did they?

TJ: Yes, don't you get a part of this money?

BART: No one from Homestore, Realtor.com or PicturePath said anything to me about that.

TJ: Oh, well maybe you should look into that.

BART: Okay, TJ thanks, I will. Bye.

TJ: Bye now.  

BART: #$@$! Realtor.com !!! 

...............................................

To make a long story short, I call our PicturePath people and Realtor.com and I got the phone shuffle from one guy, to another woman to another department. Essentially, I never get to speak to a live person. I just got shuffled off to the sisters of voice mail mercy.

We've been hosting our Voyager servers with an International hosting company called NTT Verio in both Dulles Virginia and San Jose California. We've hosted a little over $32 Billion dollars of home inventory for Century 21, RE/MAX, Coldwell Banker and a boatload of independents and private individuals in Mexico, Costa Rica, etc. Our servers are reliable and expensive.

I cannot believe that some bird brain at Realtor.com has the audacity to do this to me and everyone who hosts tours with Realtor.com? This is illegal, right? 

Realtor.com tells REALTORS their tour are being linked for FREE from us virtual tour vendors and at the same time manages to bilk the REALTOR out of $2,000 or more to biggie size their listings with tours on Realtor.com.

Gee, that's swell. But I still have to pay my bills every month to NTT Verio for hosting or they cut me off.

LET'S REVIEW:

1.) Some Bozo at Realtor.com figures out how to extract more money out of the pockets of thousands of REALTORS,

2.) At the same time, they wipe out thousands of dollars in hosting fees and WE 360 tour vendors get the short end of the stick. We lose revenue, and we have to host the links for our clients for free. 

In my humble opinion, this really sucks and SMACKS of Sherman Anti Trust.

I'm guessing this sort of twisted thinking came out of the same warped brain of Stuart Wolff, former CEO of Homestore who managed to make thousands of dollars in profits for himself by setting up advertising scheme to do ads on AOL and other networks, play with the books and inflate the stock. Stuart got caught and well... things get so bad at Homestore they change their name to Move.com (like no one will notice this, right?)

So I'm just looking at our 2007 Profit and Loss statement (year to date), and I'm comparing this to 2006 and 2005 and I'm left here with some $72,000 in revenue that I lost from the bozo at Realtor.com who came up with the free hosting idea. I've actually sent the bill to Realtor.com but of course it never gets paid.

Why am I venting like this? Well, this is Active Rain and I'm thinking that there has to be somebody else here who's just as pissed off as I am. If you are one of them, contact me. I have an attorney that I want to introduce you to who feels we deserve a bit of money from you know who. It's these kind of stupid stunts that certainly justifies why Realtor.com is still being investigated by the Department of Justice. 

SEO Stupidity. Part 1. Who is this SEO Bozo?

Have you received this eMail from a mysterious SEO Guru named Dahner Laurence before?

Here's the email:

Send me your webpage address and I will see how it ranks on the search  engines for free. E-mail me at tonivanarsdale@aol.com .Then I will send you  a free report. If you're interested in improving your sites ranking on search engines I have a deal for all. The industry charges $20 to
submit your site to the top 7 search engines a month $200 for 100 search engines. I will send your site to all 1 million search engines for $50 a
month. My wifes site tonivanarsdale.com accounts for at least 1 pending a month plus 1 listing. Try the free report and lets see how your site is doing. If you use me I will also for free tell you how to improve your page so it is working with the search engine spiders properly.

Dahner Laurence
772-878-2187
tonivanarsdale@aol.com

Return eMails to this guy do nothing to stop the SPAM. I gave up a long time ago. I've even sent letters to the address he posts, too. 612 SE Norseman Drive Port St Lucie, Fl 34984. One of his emails is: dahnerlaurence@aol.com the other is tremendousman@aol.com

The Voyager website already has a page one, #1 ranking on Google, and on Yahoo. On MSN I have three natural positions on page one.

 Do I need Dahner Laurence to help me with SEO for Voyager360.com?  You decide.

My point here is had Dahner bothered to check my site for the terms:  real estate seo,  virtual tour cameras,  360 virtual tours, or agent broker software, he wouldn't have to waste his time sending me a bulk, unsolicted email that is about to get this guy hit with a nasty complaint filed with the State's District Attorney office for violation of the Florida SPAM Law. This guy only has himself to blame. Can you really believe he is going to submit your site to 1 million search engines for $50 a month? If you do, I have some fabulous waterfront real estate I want to sell you in Arizona and I have a free magic wand that will allow you to get a commission advance anytime you want by waving this over your broker office door.

Geez, don't get me started. The quality of this bozo's character can be immediately seen as soon as you get to the one million search engine part. Who is going to believe crap like this? Where are his credentials in SEO? Where are the references? His best selling books on SEO or real estate marketing? His fabulous magazine reviews? 

Under the new Florida ANTI SPAM Act, spammers may be sued not only by the Attorney General, but also by Internet Service Providers and may have to pay actual damages or damages of $500 for each unlawful message and attorney’s fees and costs. Violators of the Electronic Mail Communications Act are also subject to additional remedies and penalties available under other federal and state laws.

According to the law; 

1. was sent for commercial or business purposes;
2. was unsolicited and was not from a person with whom you have entered into a transaction or had a prior relationship;
3. was received by a Florida resident or sent from a computer in Florida.

any one of the following:
1. contains false or misleading information in the subject line;
2. contains a false header (falsified or missing routing information or otherwise obscures the path of the email from the sender); or
3. contains false or deceptive information in the email body designed to cause damage (i.e. virus).

Once these criteria are satisfied, a person may not initiate or assist in the transmission of illegal e-mail. For more information, The Electronic Mail Communications Act, Chapter 668, Part III, Florida Statutes (Sections 668.60-668.6075) can be found at http://election.dos.state.fl.us/laws/04laws/ch_2004-233.pdf

Every month, I get the same SPAM from this Dahner Laurence guy. Plus he appears to be in real estate which seems a bit suspicious. I went to this website, and saw his name here:  http://teamvinson.com/  He mentions low commissions, inventory of homes, and a link to Realtor.com. You might think he's a REALTOR, right? Nope.

I called the Florida Association of REALTORS and spoke to Tanya. She said Dahner Laurence is not a REALTOR and she checked the state and national database. I picture Arsenio Hall pointing a finger to his head and saying: hmmmmmmmm. 

So the last time I checked, if you are advertising real estate, offering low commissions... and you start collecting a few of these over promising SEO emails... and then you learn this guy isn't a licensed real estate agent. Do we have a problem here?  What do you think? 

So does anyone believe the eMail from Mr. Laurence? One million search engines. Wow, does the planet really have that many? Last time I checked, the only three serch engines that counted and gave us traffic was Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Realtor.com fits in there somewhere too, maybe Trulia, too. This guy must think we are all a bunch of lemmings.  

If anyone has had any SPAM experience with this Dahner Laurence guy, I'd like to hear what your experiences are, so send me your blog comments. If you have given money to this guy and you didn't get what you were promised, I want to know this too. I will be sure to call you and ask a few questions for a revealing investigation I have been doing on this guy and other SEO bozos for the past two years. I will be including a bit more on this development on Laurence Dahner in an upcoming radio episode of the Real Estate Show, covering the Good, Bad and Ugly of SEO. 

Okay, so stop reading my blog now and go out and sell some houses. I mean it. Go.  

- bart 

Real Estate SEO :: Location, Location, Location for your Web site

Ta-daaaaaaaa! I finally released my 2nd book on real estate marketing, I took this weekend to clean up the countless number of banker's boxes filled with emails, magazine articles, scribbled research notes, bar napkins and papers that I managed to store away like a pack rat. Two boxes alone were overflowing with phone messages, mostly from people who desperately wanted answers to their own SEO questions stemming from over promising bozos that managed to give their clients nothing but lots of excuses. 

I have to confess -- I've not been a big fan of blogs as I thought they served no useful purpose whatsoever. BLOGs were nothing more than another stupid marketing fad like a pet rock. In a few more months, they'd be history. I waited a year and was amazed that BLOGs were still here. Okay, I thought, it will take two years until the fad runs out. 

Let's get real here. Who wants to read about an agent talking about themselves and nothing else? How good they are with horses, how well they know the local area, blah, blah, blah. The agent photos change, but the words are all pretty much the same thing. It's plenty of boring stuff filled with grammatical mistakes, misspellings and topics that do nothing for helping me get that commission advance from my broker tomorrow. (Or, fill in the important topic for you, here.) I was wrong. BLOGs are important and people DO read them. People DO get benefit from reading them. 

If anyone besides me is a member of the advertising agency community -- another idea emerged recently that thousands of us thought was equally stupid. Consumer produced content. Ads being produced by consumers? What the hell...? What does Joe consumer know about creating an ad that will sell the product or service? It takes years of design, creative direction, college, working at a national advertising agency getting experience in this sort of thing. Letting a consumer produce an ad signaled the Kill the Messenger syndrome in many of us. We spent years developing our skills and now a consumer is going to produce an ad?  There goes the neighborhood. Many of us were afraid we'd lose our national contracts to a consumer that came up with a clever ad campaign. Did you see the movie with Dudley Moore, Crazy People? The movie is about a group of mental patients who actually came up with a set of killer campaigns that well... sold a LOT of product. But this was just a movie. Right?

Well, as it turns out, I'm wrong there too.

Because thanks to social video networks like YouTube -- consumers now have a pretty big stake in helping to create hot new brands. If you have something unpopular to say, if you've done something bad, then a few million people can sink and kill your product or career. If George Lucas does not mind me borrowing a phrase here from Star Wars, That's the Dark side of the Force. 

As a REALTOR, you might be thinking the same thing about the new crop of tools designed to help For Sale by Owners (FSBOs). What consumer knows how to stage the home for a sale, curb appeal and let's not forget about the protection the listing gets by using a brokerage. Did he consumer take the ePro test and get a better score than you? What the hell do FSBOs know about on-line marketing? Sort of makes you mad, right? Are you a little bit pissed off you missed a lot of commissions last year from the arrival of tools that help FSBOs? 

There's FSBO websites, Trulia.com, Zillow.com and there's a lot more change coming. There's a quote I like from General Eric K. Shinseki, former Army Chief of Staff. He said, "If you don't like change... you're going to like irrelevance even less."

So much for my idea on fads. Social networking is here to stay. FSBO marketing is real. BLOGs are not going away, either. 

With that being said, I sound like a hipocrite because my first blog on Active Rain smacks of the same thing. But everyone can change their mind and I think I just changed mine as I can now see the benefits of blogging. 

As I have traveled and spoken to many REALTORS, estate agents and solicitors across three countries -- I have come to re-examine the usefulness of BLOGs as a medium to allow those of us who know things can now be in a position to teach others. For those of you who are familiar with the Holy Bible, there is a passage that reads something to the effect of:

Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.

A popular motivational speaker, Anthony Robbins tells us something equally motivational: Success and Failure leave clues. If you find out what the successful person does and if you repeat the same steps you are going to achieve the same if not better results.

EXERCISE: Who doesn't look at Broker Bob's first page visibility on Google and ask the question: How the hell did he manage to land that kind of page rank? If getting there was cheap and easy... then anyone could land a top page rank, right? 

One of the rubs of being successful in this business is this. If we have a system and it works, we do not like to tell others about it. Rule of Thumb: It still takes money to make money. There are no shortcuts. 

As our industry has slowly evolved into a marketing driven business -- as consumers have arming themselves with information they never had before, as leads have been reduced to a trickle coming from real estate guide adversing... we have all woken up to the fact that many thousands of us have zero visibility online. And THAT's where the customers are. But don't just take my word for it. Read the annual home buyer report guides published from the National Association of Realtors. More the three quarters of your customers are coming from the Internet. So if you're still spending 75% of your annual budget on real estate print ads... it's stupid. It's time to wake up and revise your spending. It's time to shift 75% of your annual ad spend on Internet visibility. Not print ads. 

If you're a REALTOR, the axiom Location, Location, Location is hyper critical to your success. With only ten natural page results positions available on the first page of Google, Yahoo or MSN -- the mystery of how agents and brokers GET and maintain one of these coveted positions seems elusive. Yet there are no shortage of over promising bozos that all promise the same thing. They can GET you there for a monthly fee. But how do you tell who's lying or over promising? How do you measure their credentials and effectiveness at their ability to deliver what they say? 

The purpose of my last book was to show you what questions to ask during the Interview process and I included step by step directions how you can help your site get the ranking you crave.

There's a lot more than a few myths out there about SEO. My passion about writing about this area of real estate marketing is to help you understand what the myths are, where the pitfalls are and how to avoid giving your hard earned commissions to the marketing bozos.

My third book on real estate marketing will be published next August 2008. It will come with an audio CD recorded from one of my 2007 SEO workshops. The book will be a collective of actual case studies of what works, and what doesn't work. This BLOG will be my forum for listening to your success and horror stories.  

So let's go. Please give me your good, your bad and ugly stories of your SEO experiences.

 - Bart

P.S. Stop reading my blog and go sell some homes now, okay?