Agents News is quickly becoming Helpmegetpaid.com.
In what is becoming a familiar refrain, people who are being let go from crashing and burning real estate dot-coms are calling me and telling me the same four things:
"It was a great company with a fantastic product."
"If only we'd _________ (fill in the blank with: received our funding, had better management, overcome that product glitch faster, etc.)
"They still owe me $$$, can you help me get it?"
"Please don’t use my name."
Excuse me, but you've lost your job, and they owe you money. And you're worried the situation might get worse?
Today, the calls came from former Homes.com employees. They somehow hope that things Will Still Work Out, then as reality sets in, they realize they need to do something about Getting Their Money. Yet, they don't want the company to get hurt because it was a "great place to work."
According to some Homes.com former employees, they allege that they are not only getting hurt financially, they did some things that they now regret, like compromising their personal credit to keep Homes.com afloat.
The former employees who contacted me said that they put their travel expenses on their personal credit cards at the company's insistence, allege the eMCs, and were reassured by vice president of sales Ricky Del Santro that they would be paid. Del Santro could not be reached for comment.
Some of these salespeople also say they compromised their standards. While they knew that their Homes.com credit cards were no longer good at hotels and car rental agencies, they say they continued to tell Realtors that all was well in order to make the sale. One eMarketing Consultant (eMCs) who left the company several weeks ago told me that she was "forced" to tell real estate agents, for example, that PREP productivity software was included in their Web site purchases, all the while knowing that the software had significant bugs and wasn't shipping at all. (The software did ship recently, according to the company.) Other eMCs 'fessed up that they did the same thing, but they are sorry they did so now.
Too bad for all those agents who spent needless frustration and money on software that didn't work? Insists one repentant eMC, "We had to do it. We knew that PREP wasn't shipping, but our job was to sell Web sites. We were told that the problems were being fixed."
Now these same Homes.com refugees are singing a too-familiar marching tune. "It was a great place to work, the company had a wonderful product - the best Web sites ever for real estate agents, but they owe us money and we're afraid we aren't going to be paid."
And now the eMCs are stuck with the check, along with others, including free-lance technology trainer Stephen Canale. "They owe me for several seminars," says Canale. In an attempt to reach the Homes.com CFO, Canale says he was met with a phone recording that said that accounts will be paid as funds are available. Again, repeated calls to Rick Del Santro were unreturned.
"We used our own credit cards with the full expectation that we would be reimbursed," says one eMC who says she is owed more than $13,000. She says the eMCs are banding together for a class action suit and say they are already talking to a lawyer. The sources are afraid that Homes.com may be preparing to file bankruptcy, they say.
Meanwhile, says another eMC, Homes.com is demanding she return the company's laptop and other property still in her possession. She says she will, as soon as she is paid.
