On November 30th or, or thereabouts our member base was spammed by a competing website company. The email had this subject line: Does Point2 Agent Provide What You Thought You Paid For? We had made a mistake in our “online office” and temporarily exposed email addresses through one our systems. A script was likely written, email address were collected, and spam was sent. We closed the “hole” in our system and email address can no longer be harvested. I assumed that the company sending the Spam, ihouse, was likely unaware of the transgression at the top level. I called the CEO, Paul Sheng, as a business courtesy to let him know what was happening. I got a call back from Ken Wu in business development. Ken was a nice enough guy, but seemed to suggest that if the marketing department was doing this as a planned thing there would be nothing he could do about it. He promised to get back to me but I have yet to hear anything. So back to the question, is spamming someone else’s customers worth it? Drum roll please … The answer – Hardly if one is to go by what our members had to say about ihouse.
Here is the email with this subject line:
Does Point2 Agent Provide What You Thought You Paid For?
This is a copy of the emial I sent Ken Wu, at ihouse. I still haven’t heard back from him yet.
Hi Ken, it was nice talking to you today. As promised here is a copy of the email. It appears that many in our customer base were emailed this message. As a professional courtesy I thought I would let you know that someone in your organization is tarnishing your reputation. We have a very loyal customer base and I hate to see them speaking out and bringing disrepute to the ihouse name. I have taken the liberty of attaching one of the many discussions on our message board about this practice.
Best Regards,
Brendan King
Chief Operating Officer
Point2 Realty Solutions
Toll Free: 866.977.1777
Office: 306.955.1855
Cell: 306.717.3808
I loathe spammers. And spamming is exactly what iHouse did. Personally, I would be *highly* suspect of any company that had to resort to such a tactic to generate sales.
Realestate.com, a Point 2 “partner” is getting close to that point by releasing highly ranked P2 site URL’s to their prospects and claiming that they helped in achieving those rankings. See this P2 forum thread for more:
http://p2a.point2.com/message_board/view_topic.asp?ParentID=40667&x=9&domain=SAS&searchterm=#LastMessage
Hi Jay, thanks again for bringing this to our attention. Our deal with realestate.com is a commercial deal whereby they purchase and supply their agent network with our product. Realestate.com is very happy with our relationship and our product and would not intentionally jeopardize either. We are very serious about making sure that this type of misrepresentation does not continue to occur. I apologize to any member of our network who has been misrepresented and we are working diligently to ensure that this doesn’t happen in the future. Thanks again Jay for brining this to my attention.
In my book, Point 2 Agent is doing an awesome job. There are rooms for improvement, but compared to the competition you are heads above. I have used many of the competitors websites and the product and service at P2Agent is better. Spammers rely on consumers getting a poor product and poor service and hoping that you’ll listen to their sales gimmick. Spamming is not always bad, that is how I switched from my old site to P2Agent. I received a spam from a happy P2Agent client.