I received a fax from 1st Century Mortgage claiming to have qualified/pre approved loan applicants who agreed to receive a homeowners quote. We are independent agents and this seemed like a very attractive offering. He (Richard Pierce who is supposed to be the SR. VP) claimed to be doing this for 4 months now and were aggressively searching for agents to bring added value to their loan service. They said that the agents were thus far closing 35% of the referrals.
They said they were not a lead service provider but wanted to bring added value to the table. He said he would give us exclusive rights to zips codes we preferred and would deliver 200 referrals a month at $10 each. If we did not write the home, they would replace the lead free of charge. We recieved from their IT person our log in to their program and begain received "referrals" on Thursday (4/9/09). The so called referrals were missing even the basic info to do a homeowner quote.
Most had no addresses, all had no emails and most or all phone numbers were bad. I called to complain and Tarama said that they had a virus in their system and would correct it by Tuesday or Wednesday of this week. I cannot get a return call from Pierce and after seeing the complaints on various sites, realized that we got scammed. Any fellow agents reading this, beware. I do not expect to see our $2000 returned to us.
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