Buyer Beware: The Dangers of Consumer-Facing Tech in Today’s Real Estate Market

Chances are, you’re reading these words on the single most used piece of technology of our time-your phone.  Is there anything we can’t do with this palm-sized hunk of plastic?  I’m guilty of all of it.  Checking on your friends near and far, sharing cute pics of your pets, reading emails, tracking the quality of your sleep, looking at your schedule for the day…I did all of that before I put my glasses on and got out of bed this morning.  Last year, I even did some really space-age stuff with my phone.  I bought a car that I had never seen and had it delivered to my house.  Signed all the paperwork and paid for it-using nothing more than my smartphone.

I’ve purchased quite a few cars in my life, and as a Realtor who reads contracts and deals with wire transfers of large sums of money every day, I thought that I was well prepared to navigate this process without getting duped, scammed, or just generally taken advantage of.  I had the luxury of taking my time.  My current car was running and getting me from A to B, but it was 12 years old and starting to have the problems that make you stare longingly at those internet ads of the shiny new ones, with all the tech (!) that my trusty 2010 model just didn’t have.  We all know that you only have to do one search on your phone before those targeted ads start showing up.  I’m easily persuaded and began spending my evenings poring over available inventory in the Triangle, all the while telling myself that I wasn’t REALLY going to buy anything right now, I was JUST LOOKING!  The online auto sales platforms knew otherwise and had me in the palm of their little tech hand.

What I discovered quickly was that the current state of used car inventory truly mirrors that of the real estate market today.  Prices seemed wildly inflated, there wasn’t much to choose from, and if I wanted to buy something brand new, it was going to come with a hefty price tag and a wait time that nobody could predict.  Turns out supply chain issues are raging on still today and microchips for cars (more tech!) are much like toilet paper in April of 2020.  All the more reason to go the online purchase route, right?  I suddenly had access to cars all across the country, and for a fee ranging from $99 to just under a thousand dollars, most of these sales platforms were happy to transport the cars right to me.

Truth be told, I knew exactly what I wanted, and those online sellers knew it too.  They emailed the car right to me in early December.  I did the most due diligence that I could figure out how to do-reading vehicle history reports, staring at the 360 degree images looking for tears, dings, dents.  I thought because the company actually highlighted a few flaws in the paint that was a good sign.  Surely if they were disclosing imperfections then they wouldn’t sell me some trash car!  I called my mechanic and had him stare at all the info, too.  Once I figured that there was nothing left other than pulling the trigger, I initiated the wire transfer and scheduled the delivery.  Yes, I verified where the money was going.  Wire fraud is a real thing, and that’s a whole other blog post.

I should have known better.  I tell clients every day that the people on the other side of the deal do not care not one bit about your best interests.  No sooner than that wire transfer cleared, suddenly there were barely any responses to my email inquiries regarding delivery, hours of hold times where I was disconnected, and suddenly a process that was supposed to be “easy” and stress-free was taking up lots of my precious time.

The car was delivered on December 23^rd-their date of choice, not mine.  I had 7 days to kick the tires and a mileage limit of a few hundred miles within which I could return the car, no questions asked.  I was driving 500 miles the next day to my parent’s home for the holidays, so I drove the car straight to the mechanic, and noticed on the way there that there was a loud rattling noise coming from who knows where.  Great.  Can’t see that on your phone.  My mechanic drove it and said, “Hey, seems like a great car, but did you hear that noise?  I couldn’t drive it like that.” Turns out the headrest was broken and rattling like crazy.  He couldn’t figure out how a headrest could be broken like that without the car having been wrecked.  Vehicle history report didn’t show any accidents…so I have to wonder, was I lied to?  Was the report doctored?  Who knows.  The replacement headrest was shockingly only $300, and if you drive a car with the badge I do, that’s the cheapest repair you will ever encounter, so I didn’t freak out.  Other than that, the car had a clean bill of health, so I decided to take my trip and get it all sorted after the holiday. 

December 26^th, I reached out for what would be the first of countless phone calls to the support department for the online platform to see if they would reimburse me for the headrest.  In total, I would estimate that I spent more than 20 hours on hold in the next 30 days.  Sometimes I would get hung up on, sometimes I would get a person on the phone who said that they escalated the ticket to a supervisor, and on two occasions, I had someone tell me that the reimbursement was approved and they were overnighting a certified check for the amount to me!  Full disclosure, that was almost 4 months ago.  Still waiting.  I finally decided my sanity was worth more than $300 and gave up.

The moral of the story is, purchasing something sight unseen has it’s dangers-and while technology has given us lots of tools to feel more confident doing it, you’re still taking a risk.  If you have questions on how to be most protected during a home purchase, call me, Alyson Gulassa!  Don’t rely on your 2:30am online search and a Write an Offer! button to get you safely to the finish line on your next home purchase.