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.