If you thought your listings were safe on Trulia, think again. As a matter of fact both Trulia and Zillow are open to hijacked listings being placed there.
I wrote about this the other day, you can read it here. Hijacked to Craigslist, I get, but TO Trulia? Really?
My MLS no longer uses ListHub, the feeds are loaded to Trulia and Zillow directly by my company. That is actually irrelevant, in my humble opinion. What is relevant to me is that our listings should be safe on the big 3, and they are not. (I cannot answer for the safety of Realtor.com, I can only tell you that on both Trulia and Zillow there are sections devoted to cautioning people searching for rentals.)
I got help from Robert Freeman of Pro Real Estate Marketing, who read my post on Google+. (Thank you Robert!) He found the SECOND fake listing and requested more information via email on Saturday. At the end of the email is what he received back from the scammer. (I called the number listed also, it is a Google Voice number and no one responded to my message for more information)
I have a bit more time to wait before Trulia opens their customer service lines. I have already flagged the SECOND listing as fake, and it was removed. However I think these people put them up only for a day or two. The only thing I could think of to do until I could actually speak to a Trulia person was to cancel the listing, with my clients consent of course. I also have put it back into draft mode with Realbird. We will decide today how to proceed based on what I find out and what my company attorney finds out.
There has to be a better way to protect our clients, and I firmly believe that Zillow and Trulia need to address this asap. They are NOT a Craigslist, they are a well known, huge corporation that people use on a regular basis, a company that asks money of us to become "pros".
And please, have customer service reps available on the weekends. Even if it is only the fraud department. This is very serious to me, to my client and to the tenant that currently resides in the unit. I believe they make enough money to remain open during the weekend hours. Real estate doesn't sleep, and their end users don't take the weekends off.
The National Association of REALTORS has put up a video on what we need to do to protect our listings and what to do about it. This will now have to be part of the listing process.
Below is the email received. I removed is the name at the end of the email because they actually used my clients father's name. Fluke or not, I don't know. I also removed the hyperlink they put in there.
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