I paid a former broker on this site something like $800 and was happy with my net savings / quality of the service from both the broker + dealership. I actually just moved to the DMV area and was looking at this broker for getting my parents a car, but seeing these reviews and the allegations around extremely unethical behavior on kickbacks is downright disgusting. I’m glad this has all surfaced so I can avoid this broker and dealership like the plague.
I hope that if anyone has actual evidence on the relationship between the dealer and broker here they escalate it appropriately, it degrades the brand itself to some extent for me knowing there is tacit approval of this kind of sales behavior.
I will also add that I did relatively little diligence when picking my initial broker, thinking that folks on the site self select based on the fees and implies a level of professionalism / quality, but clearly is a red flag to do more diligence the next go around. I hope the site admins consider and investigate how corrupt the alleged sales relationship with the dealer is in addition to the sloppy and unprofessional behavior on the part of the broker who seems to be in business partially because of a personal connection vs building real relationships with dealers like other brokers here work hard for (which has seemingly caused real issues on the buying experience).
@michael I think a star rating system used by all major sites like Yelp, Amazon, Google would be the answer here. It would allow users to see overall rating and filter the 1* to read the bad reviews. This would remove the shady practice of burying bad reviews.
We have ran into issues previously where marketplace type features like that are very difficult/not possible to implement with the system that this site is ran on, which is designed more for messaging. Incorporating it would require significant changes.
I don’t know if that’s the case in this specific situation, but it has been a hurdle with other features.
It sounds like a lot of work to address a problem that, so far as we (or at least I) know, is isolated to one broker. It’s a pattern with one person, not the way the site works as a whole.
What’s going on right now isn’t evidence that the system is broken, it’s evidence that the broker is broken.
Thank you all for the passionate input and constructive criticism and suggestions to make this a better place. We are surprised and humbled to see so many members submitting their different perspectives and experiences. We think by now we have gathered a well-rounded collection of comments which are centered around several themes. We will need to take some time to deliberate before we get back to the community. We will close this thread for the time-being.
