Want money back at closing?
Don’t use ePerks!
There are a handful of real estate companies who will give you back money at closing. In the Twin Cities area, a company with a big green house logo and slick website have exploded onto the scene with TV ads, billboards, bus benches, etc. On a national level, ePerks offers similar rebates.
As a Realtor, ePerks is similar to many other lead generation websites in the way that they want your money and don’t give you much (if anything) in return. I get emails and phone calls several times a week with great “opportunities” for leads.
Well, to get to the point about ePerks, when they went online they hired bloggers to hype their services. Vlad Zablotskyy was one of them and he quickly realized ePerks was a company he didn’t want to promote. He started his own blog to discuss the situation and it became popular with agents who felt the same way - ePerks takes your money and doesn’t offer a good service.
I’m not a lawyer, but looking at the court papers it appears ePerks owner Ben Behrouzi (why did he have to ruin a perfectly good first name?) is suing Vlad for slander. This is due to a post on another blog where ePerks “allegedly” called Vlad a child molester and was “allegedly” caught red-handed. Vlad called them out on it and now ePerks is “allegedly” losing customers.
I watch enough People’s Court to see that Judge Milian typically yells at people when they ask for pain and suffering. “Hey, join the club buddy!” On the opposite side of the coin, Vlad will surely incur big legal expenses. So the good folks at Bloodhound Blog created the Support Vlad Zablotskyy Legal Defense Fund - click on the image below to see how you can help.
Support Vlad Zablotskyy’s Defense Fund
Defend your own right to free speech!
One last note - I emailed a local Realtor who I noticed was signed up with ePerks. He told me:
I signed up for the lowest level and in 2 months I never received a lead so I just canceled it.
Looks like another lead generation company trying to get their hands on my hard-earned money.
UPDATE:
I received emails from two more local real estate agents about their experience with ePerks:
I signed up with ePerks maybe 7-8 weeks ago and I purchased three zip codes exclusively. I put in my request to cancel yesterday. According to their “statistics”, I should have received somewhere around 15-20 leads by now and I have received exactly 1 - and I’m not convinced that the one wasn’t created by ePerks themselves. When I look up how many people have visited the site and how many contacts have been made - they listed two contacts. It was the same person twice.
Personally I wouldn’t recommend it. I own Eagan, Stillwater and a chunk of Woodbury and haven’t gotten squat out of it. If you can’t get leads in those areas, then nobody is looking at this web site.
So far it has been a bust, I have been with them for about 3 months and I got two exclusive zip codes. I have received 2 leads so far; one was a guy that swore up and down he didn’t sign up and didn’t know how I got his info and the other had bad contact info. The main reason I signed up was because the sales guy told me that they have a guarantee if within 6 months you don’t get an ROI you are free till you do. Later I found out they give you just the general membership for free which I think would be pretty worthless. So far I don’t think eperks is worth the money. Hope this helps.
I signed up for the exclusive membership, but I am finding that it may be kind
of a waste… I have only recieved 2 leads (neither of which called me back…
One said he wasn’t even in the market!), and have been in for over a month. I
may cancel…
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Well done. I’m just throwing this out there- but it sure sounds like ePerks was losing customers long before Vlad came along. Sounds like he just nay have been a good excuse to blame failing sales on. If ePerks worked wonders for Realtors- would they quit even if the company was in battle with poor little old Vlad? In this market, could Realtor afford to that? So, perhaps the eJerks should come up with some better arguments.