I am a real estate agent that decided to call Housevalues.com after receiving an email from the Realtor board. The sales rep told me about the services and said that I could sign up for a discounted rate for the first three months. The cost would be $99 a month for the first 3 months and then $250 a month for the rest of the months. He said that this was a trial period and that I could cancel at any time.
I was excited about this and decided to sign up for 2 areas which would cost me $99 each every month. I figured that I could try it out for a few months and then cancel if I didnt get any leads, which is what the service is made for. I thought this was a great offer and even repeated the offer to the guy making sure that I could cancel within those first 3 months with no penalty.
He told me that I could cancel and I would only owe for the remainder of the trial period. They then sent me over the contract via email, which I skimmed over and then I signed up.
Once signed up I received leads but most of them had no contact information and I got names like "Brown Shoe" as leads.
I tried it for a couple of months and did not like the service. I did not want to pay $500 a month for services that did not work. I decided to call and cancel.
When I spoke to somebody they said that in order for me to cancel I had to pay 50% of the rest of my initial period, but my initial period was A YEAR, not the 3 months that the sales rep sold me on. When I started to complain about this the manager laughed at my problem and pointed me to the terms of service I agreed to.
I know what I asked the sales rep because I would never have signed up for a service for a year without trying out the services first. I even repeated what he said because it sounded too good to be true. The sales rep told me what I wanted to hear in order to sign me up and then sent me over numerous emails and forms to go over.
Like I said i skimmed over these and it was my understanding that the 3 months was my trial period not a year.
Needless to say they dont record phone calls so there is no proof that the sales rep misleaded me, and since i agreed to the terms of service my options are: stay with the bad service and pay $500 a month, or cancel and pay $2200 to do so.
If you are thinking about signing up, don't, if the service was worth anything then they would allow you to pay on a month to month basis like other services. I know that the sales rep mislead me and maybe it was an accident due to his missunderstanding of the terms of service, but when I spoke to him about this, of course he denied telling me anything different.
I would not complain if the service was worth the money but it isnt. The customer service reps, who probably make $8.00 an hour, laughed at my problems and accused me of lying while pointing to the misleadind terms of service that they have.
If they dont let me out of the contract I will make sure that I get my $500 worth in any way I can. Hopefully these words will save somebody from the stress and headache housevalues.com and marketleader.com have caused me.
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