Erin Dupuis

As mentioned, Erin and Flat Fee Real Estate have done next to nothing to advertise, market and sell our historic Victorian home, 3000 sq. ft. carriage barn on an acre on Main Street in Vergennes, VT. It's a unique property and I myself have advertised it by creating a website for the property (I'm a webmaster by profession), and adding feature listings on niche websites that generate a generous number of visits to the website I built for it. I've kept my temper in check and tried to communicate with Erin in a way that will elicit cooperation rather than antagonizing. Here's a sample of some of the mail messages we exchanged: -- From: Erin Dupuis <erin@flatfeevt.com>Date: August 15, 2012 8:04:11 PM EDTTo: Mattie MacGregor <mattie@ewebarchitecture.com>Subject: Re: New NY Times ad going up The third party sites are not something we have too much control over, Realtor.com I do have the ability to play around with a bit if things are not working right. As for advertising, we put it on MLS, NNEREN.com and our website. It also gets pushed out to other agents sites too. We posted on craigslist, facebook and twitter too. As discussed in one of our several meetings, we don't do print ads. Let me know if you have further questions. Thanks, Erin On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 1:40 PM, Mattie MacGregor <mattie@ewebarchitecture.com> wrote: About $75 for the online ad I'll be placing with up to 10 photos plus floorplan graphics and a large descriptive text area. (I'm not financially in a position to spend $250+ on an oline feature listing with Sunday newspaper print ad right now or I'd do it.) I was almost finished with the ad when their photo application decided to act up. According to their rep it'll be back up in the next day or two. I'll let you know when I get it up. I wanted to check in with you about a couple things. First, when will all of the information and pictures we have be up on Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com? Can you login to each of these sites and manipulate the listing that way? How do we get our property as a featured listing once all of the information is actually up there. Also, I was looking at our contract yesterday, and wanted to ask you about this: "Flat Fee's Agency Duties: (a) to advertise the property for sale; ..." What exactly does this mean? In other words, what advertising specifically has been done? And what advertising *can* be done? What are our options? Thanks, Mattie On Aug 15, 2012, at 12:30 PM, Erin Dupuis wrote: Cool! How much does that cost? On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 12:01 PM, Mattie MacGregor <mattie@ewebarchitecture.com> wrote: Hi, Erin: I'm putting up an ad for our property on the NY Times website. Just wanted to give you the heads up. -- Mattie From: Erin Dupuis <erin@flatfeevt.com>Date: July 23, 2012 10:47:44 AM EDTTo: Mattie MacGregor <mattie@ewebarchitecture.com>Subject: Re: Nibble, nibble I've talked to the Trulia folks, there is a glitch on our end but they just gave me a way around it, I just have to enter that data into this free site and we should be good! I have not received inquires from any of the places you mentioned as of yet. On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 9:34 AM, Mattie MacGregor <mattie@ewebarchitecture.com> wrote: Hi, Erin:I've got our property listed on a couple of boutique websites, and this week we're on the home page of oldhouses.com. Over the last week I've put together a couple of videos on 72main.com as well. I've been watching the web stats, and over the last week without the home page features, we've gotten over 1100 property page views. It looks like about 10% of the page views on oldhouses.com lead to viewing of the 72main.com website and almost everyone looks through the photos and property maps. Is anyone contacting you for more info? Also wanted to let you know we've nearly got both the carriage barn and attic cleaned out, and it's looking really fabulous. In addition, we've also got a guy knocking out the rotting brick in the basement and putting up concrete-filled steel posts, and that, too, is looking really fabulous and promoting air flow down there so that the musty smell is nearly gone.I also took measurements of all of the rooms, and I'll get that to you. Last thing -- Realtor.com isn't carrying our property description and other info, and we're *still* not listed on Zillow and Trulia, and I think this is really, really important. Is there anything we can do about this? Feel free to give me a call if that's faster and better,Mattie -- So, there you have it: They don't do print ads. They don't do features on real estate websites ... or even get the basic information up there. They don't do advertising. They don't do marketing. They don't put up their own signs. They don't stay in touch. I'm not sure they do much of anything. I'm really disappointed, not just because of the service; Erin seemed like a really smart, savvy young woman and I whole-heartedly trusted her. I asked her for an update last week, and I still haven't heard from her, so I've officially given up. I'm just waiting for our contract to expire in October (I'm really glad we didn't sign on for a longer term!) so that we can sell the property ourselves -- I seem to be doing all the work myself anyway.