I don’t know about you, but we’ve been hearing about so many people getting scammed on-line with vacation and regular rentals and I hate to point a finger, but most of them are coming from Craigslist.
People finding agents and sending deposits to then find themselves with arms up in the air wondering what they were thinking. DUH!! In Miami we have another type of scam, this one not so serious, but very common nonetheless. We have agents advertising our listings on Craigslist even if the MLS reads “do not advertise“. We used to love for other agents to advertise for us until we found ourselves showing up to our listings and the clients would express feeling cheated thinking the listing belonged to the person advertising on Craigslist.
Today we hit a new high – an agent advertising one of our “do not advertise” rental listings, calling us to bug us about 15 times per day, doing everything wrong and after having an executed Lease loosing the client over amateur incompetency. We found out because after the prospective tenant walked, they called us directly to help them out. The prospect had been reading Miamism and didn’t know it was our listing, and after getting fed up with her agent, ended up finding out that the listing was ours to begin with.
I know the logistics can be complicated – but can’t we do something about these Internet scams? Unqualified agents not only making our lives impossible, but making us and our clients loose time as well. I’m so over it! May listen to my friend now and open up Ineslist.com……NOT!
The worst part is that even though this is a rant about incompetency and wasting time, it ultimately is about misinterpretation of information which hurts the client directly.  I still try to understand the logic behind people who don’t want to work with agents, choose to be unrepresented and end up getting cheated.
Rant over
Disclosure:Â my dis is not against Craigslist directly, but those that choose to misuse the medium
