Buy Owner will rob you blind and then laugh! It's completely useless. It's the ultimate scam!!! Beware!!! Deerfield Beach Florida

Warning : Buy Owner will take your hard earned money, and leave you with a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach. It's that kind of feeling that you only get when you know you've been bamboozled by someone unscrupulous. The kicker is that you're the one that signs off on this ludicrous deal and you're the one who invites these people into your home. It is truly the ULTIMATE SCAM. I implore you not to have anything to do with Buy Owner. You will regret it immediately. Don't be a fool like me.

They do it with deceptive advertising, high pressure sales tactics, and complete omission of pertinent facts both orally, and in those utterly aggregious contracts that you should never, ever sign. They use completely unfair trade practices to get you to agree to the most ridiculous conditions, only meant to benefit them.

They only want your money. I repeat, they only want your money, and could care less if you ever sell your home. There is a no refund policy. Companies with unsatisfied customers don't want to give you your money back. That's how they stay in business.

A sales representative came to my house the other day, and completely lied to my face. She was extremely complimentary to me and my house. I actually liked the woman. I'm sure all of the tactics she used are taught at the sales meetings. I'd love to be a fly on the wall at those. Anyway, she took some temporary pictures of my house, and along with some stock photos she had on file, she proceeded to snow me.

I asked about a couple of the packages I had seen on their website (the Executive, and the Platinum, specifically) and she told me that they started at $10,000 and went up to $30,000. It was a complete lie. The prices actually start much lower, but they won't tell you that if they think you'll pay more. In fact, they even tell you that their plans are tailored just for you.

They're tailored for sure, based on how much your'e asking for your house, and how much they think you're worth. They deliberately omitt the fact that you are allowed to pick and choose as many or as few pictures as you want. I was left to believe that $10,000 was the lowest price package.

They make it sound feasible, by letting you break it up into 4 payments. Never do this, because they make you mortgage your home to do it.

She proceeded to show me file footage of pictures she said I neededin order to sell my home: pictures of a playground a mile away, pictures of the ocean 10 blocks away, pictures of the bay, though I'm on the land side. She even said I needed pictures of South Beach, even though the house I'm selling is in North Beach, two zipcodes away. This all sounded a little off, but I thought all this was included in the package, so what could it hurt? Wrong, wrong, wrong.

They try to get you to agree to as many photos as possible, all to be re-shot later, to puff up the bottom line. In the end I had unknowingly signed up for a 43 picture, 43 virtual tour package. It is a package suited for a huge mansion. My house is a 1,922 two bedroom ranch. They pick all the pictures, and then pretend like it was you. It is beyond wrong to contract people for something so insane.

Any buyer shopping online for house is not going to want to sit through 43 virtual tours of a small house.
There's one home on their site now with the same 43 virtual package that I signed on for. Four of the 43 separate tours are of different angles of their backyard! Why? Because a normal size house doesn't warrant so many virtual tours.

If you go to some of the more well known realtor sites, you'll see the homes they have listed have between 4 and 6 virtual tours of the key areas of their homes. Forty-three is totally excessive and unnecessay. It's bound to be repetetive, especially on a small house.

Luckily, I came to my senses a couple days later, and cancelled the mortgage deed they had put on my house, and the professional photographer that was supposed to come to my house to take the virtual tours. I have already given them a $3,000 deposit which they say is nonrefundable. The worst part is, that they're saying I still owe them $7,000 for photos and tours that were never even taken. Once you have a problem, their customer service people become rude and belligerent. One even hung up on me today. Take it from me stay away from Buy Owner.

All of this would'nt even seem so bad if they actually helped sell your home which they rarely ever do. All of those hits that they brag you'll get, simply aren't there. Neither are the calls. In the 5 days my profile was up, I was the only one that ever saw it. You will do much much better by using one of those flat rate mls listing services for a couple hundred dollars. They let you post your pictures and everything. Supplement that by listing on free sites, etc.

Whatever you do, don't add insult to injury, by going with their own realty company sneakily called MLS realty. It's just another way they have devised to get more money out of you. If you want to go the realtor route, use a good one that is not in any way affilated with Buy Owner. I know this was a long testimonial, but I was trying to be thorough. I don't want anyone else to fall victim to this scam like I did.

Nina
miami, Florida
U.S.A.