Rants and Raves : Illinois Academy of Real Estate

Beware of Real Estate Educational Scams

Tags: Scams, Real Estate Classes, Real Estate Education

I just received a call from a client that really angered me. The initial question was "How can you determine if a business is legimate?" The client had done a web search, checked Dunn and Bradstreet, white pages, yellow pages, internet yellow pages and the Better Business Bureau.

It seems that the client received an unsolicted offer of employment from this company and had sceduled an interview and was doing research to find out more about the company. She had two different phone numbers and has been calling and leaving messages for several days, but no one is returning her calls. She had two web site addresses, one of which had been deleted for failure to renew domain name and the other with no physical contact information.

The company was a real estate investment company that specialized in forclosures. When she told me that, bells started ringing in my head. It has been my experience to find that many of these investment companies and apprentice programs are at the best deceptive and at the worst ilegal or a scam.

There is little doubt in my mind that my client had done due diligence and there were many warning signs. Could the company be legimate. It could, but how can a person know?

The call angered me because the deceptive programs and scams are a blight on the real estate profession. The get rich gurus become a part of the industry in the eyes of the consumer and it is the very practices of these types of gurus that brought real estate license laws into existence in the first place.

What can we as real estate professionals do to seperate ourselves from those who would use real estate to cheat and con others. What can we do to help protect the public and the industry.

I apoligize for the rant, but I just needed to get this off my chest.

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Beware of Deceptive and Dangerous Web Sites

Tags: Deceptive Web Sites, Key Word Stuffing, Advertising

The Sad State of Search, or Why Can't I Find What I'm Looking For

As the director of an Illinois real estate pre-license school, I occasionally search key words just to see what type of real estate classes are available.

More and more frequently, I find myself being led to web sites that are no more than thinly veiled classified ads designed to take advantage of ad sense type advertising. It appears that this type of advertising has led to an explosion of web sites that are heavy in key words but lack very little real content.

This is an aggravating and disappointing situation for both the consumer and the business person. Not only do these sites outrank legitimate business sites, they pose a danger for the unwary visitor. Fortunately, I use a free program called siteadvisor, that I strongly recommend to anyone who "surfs the net". This program tests web sites and warns about those that might be considered to be adware, spyware, or other unwanted programs.

While searching for Illinois real estate continuing education today, I landed on two sites that siteadvisor warned me about. Both sites were found on "Blogger"and contained hundreds of various keywords with no valid content. The key words linked to directories that linked to real estate related sites. Because of the siteadvisor warnings, I went no further. The Blogger posting the key words left no profile but a name.

It is a shame that these types of sites are being developed. I have no complaint with a business site that offers useful content that contains advertising that might be of interest to the searcher, my complaint is about the proliferation of sites offering little or worthless content designed to generate income when an unsuspecting surfer clicks on a link. Are there any solutions to this problem other than blowing of steam in a blog like this, or is this a situation we must learn to accept?

If it is something we have to accept, then what is the value of search. We have a useful tool here,let's not abuse it to the point that it has no value.

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