Worthless ad products - junk. A churn and burn, win/Lose philosophy.
The company facing outward to the marketplace with its products and the way it conducts its business and treats its customers is despicable, a disaster, and would be unacceptable to professional salespeople who have a modicum of ethics and integrity and believe sales should be about bringing value to their customers. Homes.com does not create customers or clients, they create VICTIMS.
Poorly performing ad products
As a salesperson, you will be asking real estate agents for money for these products and 90% of the time, they will get NOTHING in return. When you review the sales you or other salespeople have made, out of 20 accounts, you will find 19 of them will have received nothing or very little for their money. The majority, 90% of Homes.com ad space does not perform. Homes.com knows this as their system tracks it. Despite knowing this, Homes.com sells the worthless ad space anyway. Every day you will be cold calling real estate agents trying to get them to buy ad space on the Homes.com website. Every day you will encounter disgruntled and often hostile agents that did business with Homes.com and feel they got ripped off. From all the agents I spoke with during my time at Homes.com not a single agent that had done business with Homes.com had anything positive to say. A number of my co-workers reported the same results. Plenty of agents said they got results with the other services.
When agents find out you’re from Homes.com some of them will get downright hostile. This is NOT normal. What is normal is the longer a company is in business the easier it should be to sell their wares. With Homes.com, it gets harder every year as more agents try it, get ripped off and spread the word. Homes.com ad product offers will not survive scrutiny. If the agent you are trying to sell to does some rudimentary checking or asks other agents, you can bet that sale won’t happen. The only reason Homes.com has been able to get away with this is the real estate industry is transitory and there are new agents coming into the business all the time.
The Character of Homes.com
One of the highlights of the Homes.com sales training was a session that urges Homes.com salespeople to sell like Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wall Street. In this training session, Homes.com showed a section of the movie where the main character, Jordan Belfort (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) makes a sale. In making the sale, DiCaprio told outrageous lies to bilk an investor out of $4000 in selling him worthless stock in a bogus company. Homes.com does a very similar thing. Homes.com sells advertising space that they KNOW has no value. When a prospective ad buyers asks about how many impressions convert to a filled out lead form, Homes.com either lies about it or says they don’t know. Homes.com knows this material fact as their system tracks it. Check out the definition for “fraudulent concealment”- concealing a material fact, that if known, the buyer would make a different decision.
Homes.com wants their salespeople to sell like Jordan. Jordan Belfort is a convicted felon who was sent to prison for defrauding people. This is who Homes.com puts in front of their salespeople as an example of how to sell. The training session was concluded with management’s lead in applauding the session and the typical idiotic chant to confirm the message of the training. Proud of this philosophy, emblazoned on the Homes.com coffee mugs they give to employees is the statement, “Focus on You not Them.” Them refers to the marketplace - prospects and customers. You refers to yourself and your commission. In other words, disregard the needs of the customer, focus on your commission and get their money, however you can get it.
Conclusion
The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort made a lot of money. But he also went to prison for defrauding people. Belfort created Victims not customers or clients. A good salesperson can make a lot of money selling a lot of different products and services in a variety of different businesses. The question someone considering working for Homes.com should ask themselves is, “who am I?” Am I Jordan Belfort and I can live with myself keenly aware of the fact I make my living by scamming people and sticking them with something that has no value? Or, am I someone different that makes sure the people I sell to are going to get something of value and that my customers are better off for doing business with me? This is a question each individual should answer for themselves.
