Continuing with our effort to address the issue of accountability within the Marketplace, we will be taking a deeper dive into this particular incident and conduct a more thorough review of Marketplace practices in the next two weeks. While we conduct the inquiry and re-examine our standards, we will suspend all Marketplace activities of the broker in question, pause all new business registration, and pause Marketplace sponsored posts.
We want to stress that Leasehackr remains a community-first platform. No commercial interest should come at the expense of community trust and integrity. We recognize a systematic review is needed and we strive to find the right balance among our diverse stakeholders.
Thank you for your understanding and support as we continue to work on building a better platform in an ever-evolving space.
The suggestions of new technical solutions and complicated written policies are predicated on the idea that the current review system failed. The fact that we’re having this discussion shows that the system worked just fine.
Your existing review system revealed a pattern of a broker failing to deliver, communicate, or issue refunds. You finally force the broker to respond, and she takes zero responsibility.
Your existing review system gave that broker’s clients a platform to inform you that this broker harassed her clients when they left less than stellar feedback. These clients posted actual screenshots of these conversations, and the broker doesn’t dispute their authenticity.
That’s what we KNOW to be true. There’s hard, undisputed evidence of this behavior happening multiple times.
What else appears to have happened? The broker immediately started to post positive review links in her own review thread to bury the negative reviews. She thought better of that, and instead reached out to certain cherry-picked clients to ask them to write reviews instead.
This broker actively attacked her clients privately when they left honest feedback in your own review system! I’m not pissed because you let her keep being a crappy broker on this platform. I’m pissed because you let her bully clients and flaunt the existing system.
I don’t need a complicated system with stars and strikes and written policies to know flagrantly bad behavior when I see it. Neither did a lot of other members of this community.
This is the first time this sort of thing happened to this extent. Expending a bunch of time and effort to implement more structure is an overreaction. The problem here didn’t start with a lack of broker accountability. It started when the folks collecting fees from the broker hesitated to do their duty to hold the broker accountable.
I applaud the decision to take real action to hold this broker to the high standards that the community expects and other brokers try hard to deliver.
After all, I don’t need to pay a broker fee to have a crappy experience buying a car… the dealership down the street does that job for free
Sorry but you are just wrong on this one. The review system failed.
Several victims didn’t review after they got their refund, more fell into the brokers"business". It all came to light because it spilled over to the main forums.
And only street several of those, with large community outcry, we got to this point.
So, credit to op and the team for taking a stance and looking at it critically. Glad to hear about the changes. I hope they go to the extent they need to. At the very least this are really positive steps.
But let’s not fool ourselves that the previous setup was good enough. The community was lucky that it was an incompetent broker and not a professional scammer.
Edit: i should have read your whole comment but you had me on the first paragraph. I think we are in agreement.
I think we are in agreement.