I'm writing this as both a warning and a request for feedback from the multifamily community about a recent issue with a new vendor in our industry.
We have recently been contacted by several representatives of a company called ForRentApartments.com or 1rentlogic.com claiming that my marketing department gave them our properties' contact information and asked that they contact the communities directly in regards to setting up advertising on their website. (I've been told that the rep is very pushy when they talk to them on the phone) They then send a follow up email that asks the staff to click on a link to activate the listing. This is very upsetting because I have personally told the 2 different representatives that I spoke to weeks ago that we are not interested in their service due to their lack of integration with feeds and the inability to control the advertising. I feel like they did the right thing by contacting me to begin with, but then when they were told no by the Director of Marketing, they began to incorporate bad business tactics by going to each of my communities and lying, saying they were told by my department to contact them directly to set up advertising.
My department has spent SO much time in the last few years on perfecting these areas of technology that I'm no longer willing to even discuss a new listing site without knowing that the integration points are a done deal and that they are already doing it with other clients.
To date we cannot find a contact for them. All of the email addresses that they are using appear to be trash gmail and yahoo accounts.
I am attempting to have the existing listings for our communities that have clicked the link removed, but cannot get a response. I have found that the parent company is a company called Kinetoscope Media and have left a message on the one phone number that I found. 847-376-8003, but no response. The content on the website for my communities are already out of date, incorrect and obviously scrapped from other listing sites. (This really messes with my tracking data too!)
This is an example email that they have sent.
Hello!
This is Martha from ForRentApartments.com, we recently spoke with you on the phone.
Please, click on the below link to authorize me to post your property on our site and your listing will be live immediately and visible to all: (link)
Has anyone else ran into this company/problem? Any advice on how to get our listings removed? I am super passionate about controlling all of our online presence and I know that there are plenty of similar companies out there republishing content. But this site is going to attempt to charge me for the listings in a rent.com module of billing and I would suppose they can since they were activated by an employee. They have a disclaimer on their site stating the minimum charge is 400.00 per lease.
1rentlogic.com/Account/FeesAndServices