In case you haven't heard, Amazon is partnering up with Realogy to entice home buyers, offering financial incentives/gifts, if they use their services to buy a home.
We all know Amazon! Realogy is a conglomerate of several different real estate firms that mostly deal with relocation transactions. Mostly.
I did a little research on this yesterday, looked at what they are offering. One thousand to five thousand, depending on home purchase price, in Amazon products and services. 150k-399k gets you 1k. 400k-699k, gets you 2500, and purchase price over 700k, gets you a whopping credit for services and products in the amount of five thousand smackers. Honestly, most of my clients would prefer a credit towards closing costs vs. a bunch of stuff they may already have that Amazon is offering as a 'gift'. And, if they need it, I'm frequently known to help with that. #AskMeFirst
So, I Googled the Realogy company. I'd heard about it but wanted to read a bit more about it. This apparently will help their company which really took a beating this past year with their stock price tumbling almost 80% and lawsuits, which the company says have no merit. Only 11% of their agents qualify for this partnership program. Okay. I thought that was a bit odd, the only 11%. Makes sense why Realogy would want to partner with Amazon since they need a financial boost alright!
But, the creepy part? Not more than 30 minutes after I was googling about all of this, reading a couple different websites and links, not entering my name anywhere.......I get a call from Meghan at Amazon saying they are looking for agents in my area. Please call. See? Creepy. Yes, I checked with my 250+ associate agents to see if anyone else had gotten a call about it. Only one....only one, plus me, and he said that was a month or so ago. Still creepy in my opinion...
So, you know how you look for a product on one website & then Facebook scrolls advertisements on their page for the same thing? Or, your email starts sending you stuff you 'may be interested in' after you were peeking at another site? Yea, we all know search engines are keeping our 'cookies' or whatever to know what we want and then give it to us....well, try to give it to us at least.
So, to me that is one of the biggest reasons I wouldn't want to get a 'rebate' from Amazon if I was looking to purchase a home. Way too much private information goes back and forth when you are purchasing a home. Do you really want Amazon to have anything to do with that kind of data? If you are looking to buy a home with a pool...likely you'll start getting ads for patio furniture or pool repair men that are affiliated with Amazon. I could make up several different scenarios for this. I'd love to hear some of yours too!
With that all said.....#AskMeFirst before you consider utilizing a rebate-back from any company that is wrapped up in gaining your information. The price you suffer just may not be worth the products and rebates you get.
Oh, and Google all you want....let me know if Meghan calls you too!
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