I would like to lodge a complaint of my own. I am trying to buy a home. I am searching the BuyOwner website because I know that these people do not have to pay a real estate commission. I am hoping to get a home in the $300,000-$350,000 range. So I know that this is anywhere from $15,000 to $21,000 that will not have to be paid out at the closing. Yet when I am shopping, I see many of these homes still priced at the same amount as other homes in the area that are with realtors. That’s why I don’t call them. I call the ones that are passing at least some of this savings on to me.

Also, I wish more people would take advantage of the photos and virtual tours. I don’t have the time to run around every weekend. I sit at my computer and shop. I would like to be able to see all of your house. Not just a few photos. I love the ads that let me walk right through their homes without ever having to leave mine!

In reading the letters that were sent in to you I would like to comment and make a suggestion for these sellers. I am an out of town buyer and used Buy Owner twice with great success to purchase both properties. My complaint is with the people selling on this site. First of all I would like to have seen more pictures of the properties I bought before jumping on a plane and flying out of state to see if I really wanted them. I also did not like having to weed through a lot of outlandishly priced homes before finding sellers I could deal with to make it worth my while flying to see them. I might also add that in both purchases that I made the sellers both came down over $50,000.00 to consummate the deal. If the sellers on this site want more action I would suggest that they show as much of the property as possible and get more realistic on their prices!

I've been reading all of these letters being sent in about how Buy Owner didn't do their part of the bargain and live up to their company's word. After going over all of these diffent home seller, who are selling their home on their own, I have a comment for you, the sellers. I am an out of town buyer and have used Buy Owner twice, with great success. My complaint is with some of the sellers on the site. I came across many properties that seemed to have fit into criteria I was looking for, but when you went to thier personal page they had either provided few pictures or the seller had the home priced so ridiculously high above what was feasibly financed, and alot of times both problems were present. I am going to be much more intereseted in hopping onto a plane to fly out of state to tour this property if alot of these sellers had displayed more of the home, especially with the virtual tours they have that make it seem as if you are in the room of the home themselves. I did not like having weed through the outlandish prices and minimal representation of the homes just to before I could find sellers who were serious about selling thier homes to deal with to make it worth my time flying in to meet with them to make a deal. I might also add that I made he sellers both come down over $50,000 to consummate the deal. If these sellers complaining on this site want more action, then I would suggest that they show as much of their property as possible and get more realistic on their prices.

Whatever you do, do not use BuyOwner.com, especially in South Florida. They blitz the airwaves with those ridiculous commercials, and you falsely believe that this is a legitimate company. IT IS NOT. In today's Real Estate market, which is sadly almost at it's worst, home sellers are feeling particularly vulnerable, and are easy prey for BuyOwner. They falsely claim that you will save money by signing up with them, when in reality, they will scam you out of thousands of dollars that you will never get back. It is a trick. Please don't be fooled. Ask them about their sales statistics. They won't give you any. Gee I wonder why?!

Let me break it down for you: Buy Owner essentially sells you a trumped up advertising package of redundant photos and virtual tours that no one will ever see. All of those "hits" they claim you will get, won't happen. The few people that do browse your profile are just lookyloos, and other BuyOwner desperate sellers, checking on the competetion. No serious home buyers go to BuyOwner.com, only sellers like you. Think about it, all of those ads you see on TV are aimed at you, the seller, and not the important BUYERS. You never see them saying, "Come to our website to buy your home." It is always "Sell your home with BuyOwner." By the way, those "sellers" in the their commercials are actors. It's all really a big, giant scam aimed at you, to line their pockets with your money. Yes, if your foolish enough to sign their contract, you will quickly realize that they will get all the money upfront, or else put a lean on your house. Folks, they are truly bad news. Just take my advice, and either use a legitimate Realtor, or a legitimate FSBO company who will only charge you a couple hundred bucks to list your house with plenty of pics. When BuyOwner asks you for thousands of dollars for a bogus service, you have to know something is wrong there. Run in the other direction. In fact, do not invite these people into your homes in the first place. You will regret it immediately.

Buy Owner is such a huge scam on so many levels, that it is truly difficult to know where to begin. From their insanely false advertising, their entirely deceptive sales practices, their ridiculous contracts, with their no refund policies, and let's not forget their absurdly rude and disdainful customer service department, Buy Owner "takes the cake" when it comes to unscrupulous. I should know, because I was a victim. Please heed my warning, and do not use this company.

If you believe their ads, you're supposed to be saving thousands of dollars by using their services. In reality, you're essentially throwing thousands of dollars away. A Buy Owner salesperson came to my home in late Feb. 2007, and proceeded to lie to me to get me to sign a contract. I asked her about various packages, and she literally said they started at $10,000 and went up to $30,000. This was a total lie. They omit prices to steer you towards certain packages. I now know, after some investigation, that the prices start much lower. She led me to believe that $10,000 was the lowest, and that I'd be saving so much money when my house sold. I have since learned, that they size up the prospective client, and try to sell them the most expensive package they can, without disclosing any lower prices, even when asked. For some people it's $2000, for some it's $4,000, for me it was $10,000. This is illegal. I canceled my contract on the 3rd business day after signing up, but they refused to give me even a partial refund. After I complained to various agencies, they agreed to change my package to a lessor one that I had originally inquired about. It turned out that it was actually $5,000, so they were to credit me the difference of $5,000. They promised they would, in a taped phone conversation, in the interest of an amicable resolution. I agreed, but then I never heard from them again. No refund, no nothing.

Not only that, but they do practically nothing to find all of those buyers that the spokesman in the commercial claims they do. He even says,"We find you the buyers." It's simply not true. The South Florida customer service manager I spoke with even told me that they didn't have to find any buyers, because it's implicit in the name. Thus they spend all of their advertising dollars soliciting you, the seller. Why? Because they get your money up front, and could care less if your house ever sells. Well, they will start to care when their business plummets. Twenty four years ago, when there was a different company owner, and no internet, things may have been done differently. I don't really doubt that. Now, however, greed and corruption have gotten the best of them.

It has been nearly 2 years now, and we are providing this comprehensive account of our experience with BuyOwner (www.buyowner.com) a real estate advertising service for purposes of consumer awareness.

We hope it will save others from our experience.

Summary of Our BuyOwner Experience:
> BuyOwner charged us $2649 on 7/8/2005 for their real-estate advertising service.

> In our opinion, they used extremely aggressive and arguably deceptive sales practices (dramatically overstating the service’s effectiveness)

> The Sales Person carefully avoided any mention of BuyOwner’s infamous “No Refund” policy.

> During the setup of our ad on the BuyOwner website, we began to notice the quality was below our expectation.

> We noticed that the 360 view, still picture quality, factual information, flyer generation amongst other things (read details below) were unsatisfactory.

> We had hundreds of views of our home, but we had 0 visitors to our home and only 1 call.

> During the 3+ weeks we used BuyOwner, we made numerous follow-up calls (logged below) and emails to voice our complaints about quality, but BuyOwner was non-responsive to our requests.

> When it became obvious BuyOwner was not going to respond, we attempted to cancel and negotiate a partial refund.

> BuyOwner quickly canceled our ad, but made no attempt to reimburse us even a portion of our paid monies.

> We were then forced to advertise ourselves (using a custom website, open houses, etc.)

> Within 3 weeks using our own advertising (custom website, custom flyers, custom signage, open houses ~ no Realtor was involved), we had over 40 visitors and 2 offers.

> We sold our home entirely ON OUR OWN, with NO assistance from BuyOwner, even though they kept our money and cancelled our ad.

We believe BuyOwner provided unsatisfactory service (again, see below for many details) not commensurate with what they charge.

We further feel we have had to invest significant money and effort to overcome BuyOwner’s deficiencies. We used the service for less than 3 weeks before initiating our dispute.

During our dispute, we made every reasonable attempt to negotiate a refund that would allow BuyOwner to be reimbursed for “sunken costs” (i.e. photography). Though we genuinely tried to resolve this in an equitable manner, BuyOwner’s Irving, TX office was non-responsive to our complaints (addressing none of them) and to our request for a negotiated settlement.

In numerous discussions, they insisted on retaining the full-payment and have threatened legal action should we proceed with this dispute. The best way I can characterize them is: they behaved like a company who knew they'd done something wrong.

Conclusion: You are better off advertising yourself than using BuyOwner.

Read below for further details.

Regards,
Dirk Nielsen
[email protected]




A detailed list of deficiencies with BuyOwner’s service:

A Note Regarding BuyOwner’s Cancellation Policy

BuyOwner stipulates they have a strict “no refund” policy (please see this document in the included BuyOwner Materials).

In our case:
1. We were NOT made aware of this policy at ANYTIME prior to or during the sale (e.g. their sales person deliberately didn’t mention or point out the fine print).

2. We believe this could be a calculated sales tactic, designed to deliberately beguile and deceive homeowners into accepting and paying (up front) for BuyOwner services without any recourse should they be dissatisfied with said services.
Note: Unlike BuyOwner, most Realtors do not charge for non-performance (e.g. they do not collect their commission or charge for MLS advertising exposure.)

3. The refund policy was similarly unavailable on the BuyOwner website.

4. We only received said “policy” approximately 4 days following the posting date on our credit card when we received the “A Better Way to Sell Your Home” manual.


“Hundreds of Views” but NOT 1 interested buyer?

- Not ONE buyer whom has allegedly viewed home at www.buyowner.com has resulted in a qualified showing.

- ALL 50+ buyers who have physically been shown our home have been the result of word of mouth, realtors, our open houses, and custom marketing we invested in (www.creeksideway.com), custom flyers (due to BuyOwner flyer formatting issue), development of custom front-yard signage.


BuyOwner Flyer Quality

- The BuyOwner flyer (produced from their website) PDF lacks critical information about our property (like square footage) and it is not editable.

- The BuyOwner flyer does not format correctly (for example, we had a sentence running into our pictures). This formatting problem caused the flyer to appear unprofessional to prospective buyers. There is no ability to correct this and we were forced to create our own custom flyer.


Photography

- The 360 degree photos BuyOwner commissioned were unsatisfactory:

- The BuyOwner photographer seemed in a “big rush” to get in and out. Since photographic representation of a home is a critical aspect of selling the home, we feel this service was unsatisfactory.

- The resulting images were washed out and lacked clarity. We twice attempted twice to reschedule the 360 degree photo shoot to correct these problems. BuyOwner was non-responsive.

- Our images didn’t appear to match the functionality of other BuyOwner listings (e.g. some other BuyOwner.com listings appear to have better quality 360s than ours).

- Six still photographs were taken, but their quality was never confirmed with us prior to posting on our ad. Once posted to our ad, the BuyOwner pictures lacked sufficient detail.


BuyOwner Website

- The BuyOwner.com website has generated only 1 call since July 7th, 2005, (call was on July 10th) or approximately 3 weeks of advertising at the time of this writing.

- The 1 person who called, did call through the 1-800 number, but was not pre-qualified (as promised during the BuyOwner sales pitch)
Ability to access the BuyOwner.com website [as a seller] required 2 calls to customer service (though during the BuyOwner sales pitch we were made to believe we would be contacted immediately following the sale).

- BuyOwner.com “visitor” statistics are misleading and potentially fraudulent:

- BuyOwner does not capture unique hits to your ad. In other words, their statistics record each “view” of your home regardless of if it's the same person viewing the page over and over. This artificially inflates the statistics and deceives the seller.

- BuyOwner’s statistics also include the seller’s viewing of their own page. In our case, this artificially inflated our “view” statistics by at least 20-25% and is likewise deceiving to the seller.

- No other detailed traffic statistics are provided for consumer; therefore it is impossible to discern if these statistics are “inflated” by BuyOwner or even genuine. (This would seem consistent with most BuyOwner complaints: hundreds of views, but no calls).

- There is no method to advertise “open houses” online (as promised during the BuyOwner sales pitch).

- There was inadequate factual information on website regarding our home (e.g. compare the information from BuyOwner to that on MLS).

- There is little to no ability for the customer to modify their listing information (beyond price, email address and some 30 word captions under the pictures).

- BuyOwner.com provides no step-wise process (or even basic information) on how a potential buyer should proceed if they want to make an offer.
Directing open house visitors to BuyOwner has caused confusion because there is *no* information for them on how to make an offer.

- Determining how to educate buyers on the “buying process” is left entirely to the home owner to sort out (though this “buyer education” was part of the sales pitch).

- As a result of BuyOwner’s web deficiencies, we were forced to setup our own website (www.creeksideway.com) to ensure sufficient detail.


Customer Service

- We were never contacted by BuyOwner (unless we called them) after they “closed the sale” (though this was promised during the BuyOwner sales pitch).

- As mentioned above, we ask for and were promised a 2nd [Virtual Tour] photo shoot (to correct the washed out problems in our 1st shoot). This was never performed (as promised by the BuyOwner customer service in Las Colinas, TX).

- The sales price of our home (a critically important part of the sale) was merely a guess on the part of the salesperson, but not [professional] substantiated by facts or comps.

- An MLS report was provided by BuyOwner approximately 4 days later, but by then the sales price had been established and printed & distributed on flyers.


Directional Signage

- The BuyOwner-provided yard signs are small and arguably unprofessional in appearance when compared with the competition (Re/Max, Keller Williams).

- As a result, we are being forced to invest in our own “custom-made” yard signs.
BuyOwner provided no specific “Open House” signs (only directional signs were provided. We were forced to purchase our own.


Contracts / Forms

- The contract forms provided by BuyOwner are commonly available for FREE from the TREC website (e.g. anyone can download them).

- BuyOwner should not represent “reprinting” FREE documents as an asset of their paid-for service.
The provided contract forms are effectively useless, since they are perforated on the edge with binding holes. This forces the customer to download the same forms to print “clean” copies (for faxing, etc.).

- The BuyOwner’s materials provide little or no direction for filling out required forms (as we were expecting based on the sales pitch).
Texas and most Title companies require certain forms to accompany a completed contract.

- Only one of these forms was provided by BuyOwner:

> Seller’s Disclosure OP-H (provided)
> NOT PROVIDED: Addendum for Property Subject to Mandatory Membership in an Owners' Association 36-3
> NOT PROVIDED: Third Party Financing Condition Addendum 40-1

- We were forced to research and complete each of these our independently.

- There did not appear to be any additional contract support or advice within provided documentation (e.g. how a buyer or seller should fill the contracts out, though this was likewise promised during the BuyOwner sales pitch).


Call History with BuyOwner’s Irving, TX office:

7/5/2005 1:54pm 1:00min From 12145769777 BuyOwner Office BuyOwner called and left message following our inquiry on their website.
7/5/2005 2:21pm 7:00min To 12145769777 BuyOwner Office Inquiry for BuyOwner services. Referred us to sales rep Deanna Hall.
7/7/2005 9:52am 1:00min To 12146733416 Deanna Hall Initial setup for meeting BuyOwner sales representative
7/12/2005 12:37pm 2:00min To 12146733416 Deanna Hall Left message regarding yard sign sticker and website password.
7/12/2005 1:02pm 2:00min From 12146733417 Deanna Hall Left message regarding 12:37pm call.
7/12/2005 1:06pm 1:00min To 12146733416 Deanna Hall Left message regarding dissatisfaction with 360 degree images.
7/13/2005 10:25am 2:00min From 12145769777 BuyOwner Office Called to discuss Realtor possibly interested in showing the house. Realtor was told by BuyOwner that we may not be interested in working with them. Realtor never returned our message and never showed the home.
7/13/2005 12:21pm 17:00min To 12145769777 BuyOwner Office Discussed how to access the website (still not provided), dissatisfaction with the 360 images and other [promised] selling information still needed (manual, etc.)
7/13/2005 12:58pm 4:00min From 12145769777 BuyOwner Office Discussed website access.
7/25/2005 10:04am 7:00min To 12145769777 BuyOwner Office Spoke with BuyOwner rep (one of the 3, but not Rhonda) regarding our dissatisfaction with the service and possible remedy. Was told that I would have to address this with Rhonda and she would call me back.
7/26/2005 10:13am 1:00min From 12145769777 BuyOwner Office Incoming call from BuyOwner, but not Rhonda.
7/25/2005 4:00pm 2:00min To 12145769777 BuyOwner Office Had not heard from Rhonda yet. Left another message regarding my disatisfaction with said service and a request to call me back.
7/26/2005 11:05am 8:00min To 12145769777 BuyOwner Office Spoke with Rhonda regarding our disbute and possible reimbursement. It was a cordial conversation whereby she informed me any decisions on reimbursement would need to be made "by the president," but certainly the tone of the conversation sounded positive (as if an understanding could be reached).
8/9/2005 11:05am 2:00min To 12145769777 BuyOwner Office Could not get through to Rhonda. Hung up, tried again below.
8/9/2005 11:07am 8:00min To 12145769777 BuyOwner Office Spoke with Rhonda regarding reimbursement. BuyOwner's position was decidedly different from our call on 7/26/05. This time, they were inflexible and almost immediately threatened legal action should we not reverse our course of dispute. I informed BuyOwner that if they could 1) address even 1 of our written complaints and 2) produce one compelling piece of evidence that their alleged "services" had been effective, that I would gladly discuss appropriate payment. Rhonda provided no response to my request beyond repeating their "No Refund" policy and reiterating the threat of legal action.