Do not fall victim to Realtor® complaint site

[UPDATE:  Since this was originally posted, NAR has continued to pursue action against the site.  As of January 23 the site has been taken down, and its Internet domain record shows that it has been ‘suspended.’ This does not mean that NAR has acquired the URL nor does it necessarily mean that the site is down for good.  NAR is still working to determine its status.]

Have you received an email referencing a website called Realtor Complaints? If you have, don’t respond to it.

In Pennsylvania and several other states, members have started getting emails from purported sellers who claim they’d be interested in hiring that agent – if only they hadn’t seen a bad review on realtor-complaints.com. If you go to the site you’ll see loads of alleged “complaints” about individual agents – most of which sound suspiciously similar – and a link that gives agents the opportunity to either respond to the complaint or remove themselves from the website altogether. A response costs $49, and removal is merely $99.

There are plenty of legitimate review sites on the web, and there are others that might be considered borderline questionable. From all appearances, this doesn’t appear to fit in either of those categories. For example, though the site claims over three million visitors per month as “the most popular and most trusted Realtor® review website online since 2002,” the URL was only just registered on Jan. 1, 2013.

PAR staff has already contacted the NAR Legal Department, as have staff and members from other states, so they’re already on the case and investigating the issue.

Of course your online reputation is huge in today’s market, and NAR provides a number of tips for protecting yourself in an article from January 10 in which they discuss their initial response to this issue. But regardless of whether you’re doing any of those things – and you should be – the most important thing is that you don’t get fooled into delivering your credit card information to an offshore operation (the URL is hosted in the Seychelles) just because something that looks bad shows up in your web browser.