We’ve well and truly entered the age where Social Media rules our lives (or at least the lives of some of us…particularly those under the age of 30).

When I first opened a Facebook account (around 11 years ago), my entire experience on Facebook was playing that silly Zombie game and earning more points than two of my mates – Brett and Graeme (Does anyone remember this?)

{Footnote for Brett and Graeme – I think I beat you both which means I clicked on a button more times than you did all those years ago.}

Nowadays, Social Media is big business!

As a business owner, the most obvious place to promote your business is to do it in the place where people are glued to their mobile phone screens 24/7 – and right now, it is a relatively inexpensive form of advertising.

I’m sure this will change over the next few years and Mark Zuckerberg will further increase his net wealth of $74 billion (yes that’s right – seventy-four billion dollars…I just thought I’d type this amount).

You may remember that the lead singer of the Irish rock band U2 (Bono) invested much of his last contract fee ($56 million to be exact) in Facebook shares when the company went public back in 2009.

Today, this investment is worth around $1 billion making Bono this richest pop star in the world.

And let’s face it – almost all of us are on there!

So how does this help real estate salespeople and what are the traps if you’re a consumer?

Late last year, a client of mine called me to describe a personal ‘Social Media’ experience that is a little frightening (thank you for sharing this Jash).

It all started when Jash’s fiancé (now wife – Congratulations) was scrolling through his regular feed and noticed a property that was advertised by a particularly agent.

Because they are considering building, Jash tagged his wife into the comments so that she could view the property and gain some ideas for their new home.

The agent that was selling the property sent them each a private message asking them if they were interested in viewing the property.

Jash politely declined and replied that they were just having a look.

Normally, you would expect that this would have been the end of the story…but no, this is not the case here.

The agent then bombarded them with messages asking them if they were selling…a question that they ignored as they felt the agent went way too far.

This agent must have then placed their names in the online website of the data service provider that many agents utilise…and subsequently found out where they live.

Days later, Jash arrived home to find the personal assistant of this agent sitting on his doorstep (literally) and when he went to walk inside, the personal assistant thrust some paperwork into his hands with a pen and asked him to sign a listing agreement.

Jash replied that he is not selling his home (which was the truth) but the personal assistant was adamant that the agent sent him down to collect his signature so that he could commence marketing his property for sale.

They were continually harassed by the agent until Jash threatened legal action for harassment against the agency.

Unfortunately, this is the sort of activity that gives agents a bad name.

Even if Jash was selling, the way in which he was ‘stalked’ (and that’s not an exaggeration) would have turned the vast majority of sellers off from using the services of this agent.

Now I can tell you that this is a pretty dramatic example – I’m confident that very few agents would go to these lengths to secure new business (if I’m wrong, I’d love to hear your stories and experiences).

In my view, it’s only one step away from contacting people through funeral notices in the paper and asking the relatives if they are selling…even before the funeral of their loved one has occurred (yes, I’ve heard of agents using this tactic to secure new business).

Whilst the current laws of solicitation on Social Media are a little vague right now, I’m confident that you’ll see stringent regulatory guidelines in years to come…in order to place limitations on this sort of behavior.

Our advice is to be vigilant about what you post online and the best way to fight back is to place a clear online review of the agency in question as a bad review can be very, very difficult to remove…more about this next week!

Until then, Happy Listing & Happy Selling.