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Are Your Listings Being Hijacked?

September 12 2013

mistake mirrorReal estate professionals are constantly running into situations where their listings are being hijacked and published on sites like Craigslist as part of rental scams. The National Association of REALTORS® has a Risk Management Committee that published a guide to monitoring your listings online so you can be alerted to any unauthorized use of your listing.

NAR suggests three methods for monitoring your listings:

With Google Alerts, you simply enter the address of your property listing. Be sure to include site 'craigslist.org' in the query with your property address. Set the Result Type to Everything, set How Often to Daily, and set How Many to Everything. This is also a handy way to send a report to your seller.

IfThisThenThat is another service for monitoring your listing online. You can create a free account and set up an alert that they call a Recipe. Select Craigslist as a trigger channel. To build the recipe, do a search on Craigslist and copy the URL of the search and paste it into IfThisThenThat. The last step is to create an email alert.

The third method for monitoring your listings online is Google Images. Visit Google Images and simply drag and drop a photo of your listing from your website into the Google Images search tab.

If you find unauthorized use of your listing, use the website's report tools to let the webmaster know that it is a fraudulent use of your data. On Craigslist, you can report the listing by clicking the link displayed on the page.

These scams are not restricted to Craigslist. You should also report it to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They have set up a special site called IC3.org.

You are likely to find that other agents will advertise your listings from time to time on Zillow, Trulia, HotPads and numerous other sites. Report this fraud to the MLS and to the Association of REALTORS®.

Here is an excellent video from the National Association of REALTORS® that provides you with step by step instructions.