LeaseTrader Charges hefty fees for donig nothing but masking contact information between buyer/seller Hollywood, FL Internet

I rarely give bad reviews, let alone a ripoff report, because I believe in promoting and praising great businesses and ignoring the less-than-worthy ones; however, I want to let other consumers know exactly what LeaseTrader is about before making their own wise decisions; I know I have made a few unwise ones. For the records, I have completed 3 lease transfers through them, 2 transferring out and 1 assuming a lease. I am rounding the fees up and including the actual charges in parentheses because advertising scheme of "$9.99" so people feel like it's $9 instead of $10 even though it's pretty much $10 is just distasteful. 

In summary, LeaseTrader is more of a "advertising/brokerage" website that pretty much only "connects the seller (original lessee) and the buyer (the assuming party)" and they really don't do much work in between, and they do not do the lease transfer paperwork (or even highlight what you need to sign) for you. However, they charge hefty fees to both the buyer and the seller. 

Agree with a few of the reviewers that the customer service reps are very unprofessional. One rep I will not mention the name of, after I refused to upgrade to a higher advertising package, actually said "c'mon man I helped you get out of your last lease so you gotta to upgrade this time" to me and kept pestering me about the upgrade over the phone. Eventually I ended up not upgrading but still managed to transfer the lease; a word of advice would be: if your lease is very attractive, you do not need to upgrade; just offer more incentive to the buyer (assuming party).

Now to the meat: the fees they charge sellers and buyers.

As a seller, when you post your leasing ad, they have 3 packages available. They either charge a $100 ($99.95) for the Gold Package (which I what I recommend if you have a very attractive lease), a $200 ($199.95) for the Platinum Package, or $250 ($249.95) for Platinum Plus Package. They all do the same thing except in Platinum they will "bold" your ads for 7 days, where for Platinum Plus they will "bold" your ads until you transfer it. And of course, they offer the "Highlighting Ad x7 days" for $30, "Home Page Gallery x7 days" for $80, "Search Home Gallery x7 days" for $50, "Suggested Cars x7 days" for 20, "High Rank Search Results x7 days" for $50, and of course, the "Social Media Marketing" for $30. (Um, can't you do it on your own Facebook/Twitter?)

If you've sold with eBay it has a very similar scheme except they do it at a much higher premium. After you transfer the lease, they also take another $250 ($249.95) commission from the seller. So for the seller you pay a minimum total of $350, which does NOT include the incentive that you're offering the buyer (if you are in a hurry to transfer the lease out), nor any of the lease transfer fees required by your leasing company. 

As a buyer, they charge you $35 ($34.99) for one month's subscription (and misleadingly have the $9.99/mo on the top as an option for a "binding contract" of actually 6 months, and $14.99, $19.99 for 3 months and 2 months, respectively). They say that this includes the credit check/verification; however, it is quite misleading because you basically hand over your vital information including social security to them that has nothing to do with credit verifying from the actual leasing company you will try to assume a lease from. As an example, BMW Financial requires a credit application and lease transfer fee of $540, which is still required by the buyer (or seller depending on both party's agreement). After the lease assumption is complete, they charge another $250 ($249.95) in commission. So for the buyer you pay a minimum total of $285, not including the credit application and lease transferring fees that you may actually have to pay to the seller's leasing company. And keep in mind that they do NOT mediate the incentive that the seller is offering; you need to contact the seller yourself and perhaps even the leasing company to make sure that they have actually made the incentive payment to the leasing company before the transfer completes. So back to the BMW financial example, the buyer would pay at least a total of $825 to assume a lease via LeaseTrader and BMW financial. 

In short, seller pays at least $350, buyer pays at least $285, NOT including fees that need to be paid to the leasing company. I actually did one of the transactions entirely through BMWFS with another party without troubling LeaseTrader, yet they still charged both of us $250. Very unethical.

Of course, if they offer seamless communication with professionalism and courtesy, I am more than happy to pay the premiums; however it is to the contrary. For a minimum of $635 that they have already extracted from the seller and buyer, they only post pictures and provide contact information between the seller and buyer. They do ZERO paperwork. Buyer and seller contacts and deals with the leasing company directly. Whether or not $635 (or up to $785) is justifiable for simply posting 15 pictures and hiding seller/buyer's information from each other, is for you as a consumer to judge.