Congratulations! Now You Won’t Sell Me ANYTHING!

A few years ago, we decided to bite the bullet and start paying a mortgage instead of someone else’s mortgage. We contacted a few reputable estate companies with a long list of our requirements. This would be our first time buying and we’d been planning what we wanted our dream house to look like.

One company’s agent requested we send her a text message and supplied her number, and then she told me I should resend our list of requirements as a WhatsApp message since it was so long.

The next communication I received from her was being added to a group with a few hundred other people, and she started spamming the group with several MLM pitches. She was involved with everything from Tupperware to Avon.

I was pissed off. I am very conscious of my privacy. I absolutely hate bulk emails where my email address was being shared with that person’s entire phonebook, as I know a lot of data mining happens and these details get sold off to spammers and less reputable companies.

I was considering simply leaving the group and blocking the estate agent, but the longer I thought about it, the more I thought about how it reflected badly on the company. She was creating the impression that being an estate agent for this company obviously didn’t pay enough to survive on, but she was also abusing the information given to her by people assumed to be financially secure enough to want to buy a house. I sent an email to head office explaining how she poisoned my perception of their company, but I didn’t expect a reply.

Instead, I received a call from the manager, not of that branch, but the top of the management chain, who apologised and said this wasn’t the image they wanted to create. The manager told me the estate agent would be reprimanded.

Soon after that, I was suddenly removed from the MLM shilling group and blocked by the agent. I received a lackluster not-even-an-apology email from her manager who just said they didn’t know how they could find us a home without any requirements.

I was done with this by then and just never responded.