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A class-action lawsuit alleging unvetted and fraudulent leads across Move Network sites including Realtor.com has put a spotlight on the quality of leads offered by the News Corp.-owned listing company, frustrated agents told Inman.
Non-working phone numbers, undeliverable emails, window shoppers and likely scammers have all become common, with Realtor.com the most conspicuous provider of flimsy leads, agents told Inman — including one who paid $12,000 over four years as part of Realtor.com‘s Connections Plus program.
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“It’s an issue,” said Chris Taylor, founder of California-based Taylor Realty Group, who estimated 90 percent of leads he received through Realtor.com’s Listing Toolkit were unvetted. “Whether they’re scamming or their system is failing to properly vet and weed out people, [they’re] not taking the time to weed through everything and make sure [they’re] providing good leads to agents.”
For Taylor and other agents Inman spoke to, the Aug. 23 Move lawsuit — which also identified troubling refund policies, contract breaches and alleged data scraping to inflate lead volume — reflected many of the problems they claim to have experienced themselves as customers of the Move network of companies, including seller lead solution Listing Toolkit and agent marketplace UpNest.
Aug. 26 coverage of the suit from Inman.com
The suit itself was filed by Realtors in California, Nevada, Washington, Florida, Georgia and New York, who name News Corp., lead generation platform Opcity and The National Association of Realtors as co-defendants in what the complaint describes as a “scheme” to sell “fake” leads. The Realtors are asking for damages equal to what they spent on Realtor.com leads.
None of the agents Inman spoke to for this story are plaintiffs in the suit. Calls to the plaintiffs’ attorney were not returned.
Inman asked Move Inc. for details on its vetting process, the number of leads it vets and flags as fraudulent each month across its network and responses to the complaints made by agents who spoke to Inman for this story. A company spokesperson declined to answer specific questions due to pending litigation.
“Realtor.com is the No. 1 site real estate professionals trust as a result of our high quality products and strong customer relationships,” the spokesperson told Inman in an emailed statement. “Tens of thousands of highly satisfied customers rely on our products to connect with clients and build their businesses. We’re not going to comment on pending litigation and will vigorously defend ourselves against all claims contained in this lawsuit.”
Contract confusion
Indiana team leader Patrick Harris of ERA Crossroads Realty claimed to have received poorly vetted leads from Realtor.com in 2018 and 2019, pushing him to cancel his contract in October 2019 and experiment with other paid solutions.
Patrick Harris
However, a colleague at his then-brokerage, Century21 Bradley Realty, convinced him to give Realtor.com another try.
“I was being told by one of the agents I worked with that he had had a lot of major success with Realtor.com,” he said. “I thought things might have improved. It kind of empowered me to try again.”
Harris signed up for Connections Plus in September 2020 and switched to a six-month co-marketing agreement with a local lender a month later. The duo would share buyer leads in two ZIP codes for $600 per month.
Things went well for the first month, Harris said, until he and the lender received an email that Realtor.com had made an automatic modification to their contract that added two more ZIP codes for an additional $40 per month.
Confused by the modification, Harris decided he’d finish the contract and then leave Realtor.com for good. However, towards the end of the sixth month, Harris alleges his sales representative told him he’d signed a longer contract and couldn’t cancel.
In the Move lawsuit, eight Realtors who filed the class-action complaint also claimed, like Harris, that they had agreed to “purchase products and services online” only to later learn of “contracts, terms and conditions” that didn’t align with what was initially promised. However, it was too late to back out of the agreements.
“It was my understanding that I was only signing up for a six-month agreement,” Harris told Inman. “Ultimately, it’s my fault because I didn’t fully pay attention to what I was signing, but it just… the whole process felt very dishonest.”
Harris said he decided to make the best of the contract, taking the advice of their sales representative to switch up the ZIP codes to get better results. However, the lead quality didn’t improve.
“[I feel] they were funneling all their decent leads through Opcity, and then basically selling the scraps to the agents that were subscribing through Realtor.com,” Harris surmises.
Move acquired Opcity in 2018 and integrated the platform into Realtor.com in 2020 as ReadyConnect Concierge. Realtor.com’s lead generation explainer pages don’t reveal how leads are funneled to various platforms, only noting that lead quality can be impacted by “seasonality, natural fluctuations in site visitation, and consumers filling out the form on listings in your area.”
When all was said and done, Harris said he spent a total of $12,000 on Connections Plus between his solo contract with the platform in 2018 and his co-marketing agreement in 2020.
“I no longer have access to the dashboard, but I want to say that I probably had around 150 leads that were sent to me… I spent $12,000 during those years to only close two leads.”
‘Everything looked pretty slick’
California-based brokers Thomas Phelan and Chris Taylor claim they were plagued with unvetted leads during their respective agreements with Move Network agent marketplace UpNest and Realtor.com’s Listing Toolkit.
Both men estimated up to 90 percent of their lead went to disconnected lines or voicemails — a metric that surpasses the share of “fake” leads (40 to 50 percent) class-action plaintiffs claimed they received during their contracts with Realtor.com.
“I was interested in [Listing Toolkit] because it focused on seller leads,” said Taylor, a luxury broker in Huntington Beach. “I spoke to someone who was shockingly convincing on the phone. Normally I don’t hang up on people, but I do get them off pretty quick — I’m very blunt.”
“In this instance, I don’t remember what he said, but it was enough to get me to at least take a look at his presentation,” he added. “It got my attention. Everything looked pretty slick. Everything looked very nice.”
Chris Allen Taylor
Taylor said he’d been warned about Realtor.com’s buyer leads, but decided $2,000 for at least two seller leads per month was worth the risk. However, Taylor said he made the wrong wager, with two of the three leads he received in six months going to a disconnected number. The third lead, he said, went to voicemail.
“I should have raised more hell about it,” he added. “I mean, I have time to raise hell. I just didn’t. When they called to renew my contract, I said, ‘You sound like a nice guy, but I’m going to be honest, this is abysmal. I feel like you people have scammed me.’ I said that word for word.”
Meanwhile, Phelan, an independent broker based in Los Angeles, said he received approximately 50 leads during his first few months buying UpNest leads through Realtor.com’s Listing Toolkit.
UpNest is a Move-owned agent marketplace that enables buyers and sellers to compare UpNest Partner Agents in their market. For agents who receive leads directly through UpNest, the platform charges agents a 30 percent referral fee for seller leads and a 15 percent referral fee for buyer leads at closing.
However, agents who purchase UpNest leads through Listing Toolkit are instead charged a monthly fee.
Thomas Phelan
The majority of listings, he said, had invalid contact information. Of the leads that did have valid contact information, it led to a person who “had no idea what I was talking about” or knew nothing about the alleged property address.
“I confronted UpNest by phone and email numerous times and questioned the vetting of leads. Each time I was assured all leads were professionally vetted but no one in sales or support could define what criteria was used to vet,” he said. “Although I have a few months left in my contract, I’ve let go of using UpNest. It’s a lesson in futility.”
Don’t quit after the first call
Although agents’ negative experiences with Realtor.com have taken center stage in recent weeks, Robert Slack Chief Operating Officer Lauren Bowen said the platform has been integral to the brokerage’s growth over the past eight years.
“Our company started with four agents out of a small office,” she said of the Florida-based indie. “We’re just shy of 800 agents now and in five states, and we’ve been able to do that with Realtor.com’s help because they have multiple products that we can expand with.”
Lauren Bowen
Bowen said Robert Slack uses multiple Realtor.com lead solutions, including Connections Plus, Market VIP, ReadyConnect Concierge and Listing Toolkit.
The company purchases 15,000 leads per month, with the typical Robert Slack associate receiving 20 to 30 Connections Plus leads and eight to 10 ReadyConnect Concierge, Market VIP and Listing Toolkit leads.
Market VIP and ReadyConnect Concierge offer the best experience, she said, thanks to lead exclusivity and live handoffs. However, Connections Plus, which doesn’t include live handoffs and sends leads to other agents within a ZIP code, tends to yield a greater share of leads with wrong telephone numbers and email addresses, or leads who already have an agent.
“Do we run into it? Yes. I’d say it’s probably less than 10 percent of the time though,” she said. “If it was more than that, we wouldn’t partner with Realtor.com.”
When agents get leads with bad contact information or claim they already have an agent, Bowen said she’s trained agents to place them into their customer relationship management platform, which sends regular market updates and prompts leads to provide accurate information before they can interact with the brokerage’s site.
“With Ylopo, we set it up to where they can’t come back searching for homes on our search site until they put in their correct phone number or a different one than what we have,” she said. “Again, we set up to make sure our action plans are there to let them know we are here. If they need an agent, we send them content of value. We send them market updates. So if they, you know, if they say they have a Realtor, that can also change. That’s not a reason for us to not continue showing our value.”
Bowen also said she’s trained agents to not give up on a lead after the first call. Last year, when the market was in the depths of a downturn, she said took an average of 61 calls for an agent to get in front of a lead. This year, the average has dropped to 27 calls. The effort has paid off, with the brokerage achieving paid lead conversion rates of up to 13 percent in some markets — 1,200 percent above the industry standard of 1 percent.
“We have gotten quite good at the typical portal lead,” she said. “You just need to invest in nurturing them.”
Beyond having a robust lead conversion plan, Bowen said agents must realize that paid lead generation is also a volume game.
“We currently spend about $500,000 a month on Realtor.com, and that’s just for our Florida operations. We’re probably close to $600,000 for all of our states,” she said. “So were we always spending this? No. We started with four agents, but we’ve been able to continue to scale it and have success based on our growth goals.”
Bowen said she realizes most agents don’t have $500,000 per month to spend with Realtor.com; however, they’ll need to spend more than a few hundred dollars per month to yield the best return on investment.
“Let’s say if you’re even a great agent converting at 10 percent, then you have to have a hundred leads that month to close 10,” she said. “So if you’re only spending $200 a month for let’s say, six leads, you’re going to need quite a substantial pipeline to be able to build that up to start closing them.”
“It’s probably not going to be enough, so you very well may get frustrated,” she added. “You might have to evaluate if it’s the right platform for you.”
It’s part of the game
Like other agents, Washington D.C.-based Compass team leader Sina Mollaan had a disappointing experience with Realtor.com leads. However, Mollaan doesn’t believe his experience is the result of an attempt to sell agents bad leads.
Instead it reflects an inherent challenge portals face in gathering, filtering and vetting millions of bits of consumer data — a task that’s complicated by the public’s freewheeling approach to home shopping that includes using dud email addresses and phone numbers to avoid agent phone calls.
Sina Mollaan
“A couple of us called each other and were laughing at this lawsuit,” Mollaan told Inman. “Feels like these days, anything real estate-related, you put an ‘anti-trust’ in front of it and then all of a sudden, ‘Oh, it’s antitrust real estate, they must be doing something wrong.’ You know what I mean?”
Mollaan said the public’s obsession with endlessly scrolling listings means a lot of no-intent or low-intent consumers get added to the lead funnel. Although it may be frustrating to make calls that lead to voicemails or make calls that seem to lead nowhere, he said it’s part of the lead generation game.
“This person’s looking at a home. They may have even looked at your profile, and they’re low intent,” he said. “And you really have to nurture those leads. I give them to some of my team members to work on. I have leads that are three or four years old… Put them on a drip. They’ll want to buy at some point.”
With that time lapse in mind, Mollaan said agents need to readjust how they calculate the return on investment from any platform they use.
“With the amount of money that these people are spending — $100 a month to $500 a month — they’re expecting sales out of it. It’s almost a joke,” he said. “You need to spend money to see results. The conversion rate on these sites is pretty low. You need to talk to 10 people to make one sale. If you do super well, you know, you do a 20 percent conversion rate, one out of five, but you know, that’s very rare.”
“One hundred to $500 a month won’t get you quality leads,” he added.
Read the Aug. 23 suit here (refresh if document doesn’t immediately appear):
