Another real estate agent has filed suit against SetSchedule, alleging the lead generation firm won’t stop harassing her with autodialed calls.
According to the March 9 complaint, Alyssa Reische of Windermere Professional Partners in Gig Harbor, Washington, signed up for SetSchedule’s service on or about April 2017 in order to receive real estate client leads. But she canceled the service the same month when she realized that the leads SetSchedule sent her “were all elderly people who did not want to be contacted by a real estate agent.”
Despite Reische telling SetSchedule about 30-40 times by phone, email and through Better Business Bureau complaints to stop calling her, since April 2017 SetSchedule has called her more than 60 times using an autodialer to try to sell her SetSchedule’s services, the complaint alleged.
The complaint accuses SetSchedule of negligent and knowing and/or willful violations of the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which prohibits making unsolicited autodialed calls to consumer cell phones without their consent.
“Through Defendant’s actions, Plaintiff suffered an invasion of a legally protected interest in privacy, which is specifically addressed and protected by the TCPA,” the complaint said.
“Plaintiff was personally affected because she was frustrated and distressed that despite Plaintiff telling Defendant to stop calling her on her cell phone, Defendant continued to harass Plaintiff with calls” which “forced Plaintiff to live without the utility of her cellular phone by forcing Plaintiff to silence her cellular phones and/or block incoming numbers.”
SetSchedule CEO Roy Dekel did not respond to an emailed request for comment for this story sent to him and his attorney.
Reische’s description of her experience echoes patterns of behavior that other agents have alleged against SetSchedule, both in online forums and directly to Inman. At least two other agents have sued SetSchedule, one for spam phone calls under the TCPA and the other for breach of contract and unjust enrichment for leads allegedly “paid for and not received.”
Unlike the former, Reische’s suit is not seeking class-action status. It requests $500 in statutory damages for each negligent violation of the TCPA, $1,500 in statutory damages for each knowing and/or willful violation and an injunction to stop the calls. Reische declined to comment for this story.
Last year, the National Association of Realtors identified TCPA lawsuits as one of the major legal issues its members should keep in mind in the near term, noting that a lot of “trolling” law firms see violations of the TCPA as “low-hanging fruit.” The trade group advised its members to obtain written consent from consumers before texting them, to avoid using autodialers without consent and to scrub phone numbers in their contact database against the Do Not Call registry.
Realogy subsidiaries NRT LLC and Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC, Keller Williams Realty and eXp Realty are some of the many real estate companies currently fighting TCPA suits, but those suits have been brought by consumers, not real estate agents.
Read the complaint:
Email Andrea V. Brambila.
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