Z57

Read my complaint -- same experience except we are still trying to recover our money and domain name

Thank you for letting us know about this situation. Your description of this incident is alarming. We would like to review the call and take appropriate action. If you have any more information on who the agent was that your friend was speaking to on the phone or the date and approximate time of the call, we will do our best to identify the call and review it. Also, we certainly want to address the question you were calling in about. If you can provide more details on your question regarding our neighborhood data, I am more than happy to look into that for you and get back to you with an answer as soon as possible. Please contact us at heretohelp@Z57.com with any additional details you may have.
We look forward to hearing from you.

I am going through a really hard time with z-57. I have not complained but kept asking questions and the agents told me that they are only allowed to go over one topic at a time. everytime I asked the question for the past 4 months I was steered to buy more products. I have a few friends with Z-5. And when my friend was on the phone while he was learning the website the agent did not know I was there and said to my friend oh you know your friend ( me ) They all know her here at Z- 57 and she has her name on the ### list. she is never going get any of her questions resolved the agents hate her here and will always give her a hard time. My question was legitimate about the data and no one wanted to answer it. I am not sure what to do at this point just that it is really uncomfortable and unfortunate that bussiness can be run this way. I wonder if the Owner and Ceo is aware if all this going on. It is sad I have friends all over that are Real Estate agents and I would have referred them but instead they just reallly taught me people don't care even when you pay them for their services. They have the neighborhood date back from the 1800's and not in the year 2012! All I was doing was asking them to fix the problem. Not judge or harm my mind.

Thank you for your feedback. Email blacklisting is a frustrating process that effects many companies on a regular basis. It sounds like you spoke with our client development manager and she was able to clarify the situation. Please let me know if there's anything we can do to help in the future.

Z-57 recently got black listed from Yahoo. This caused me to loss contact with all my clients for days. When I called tonight to speak to the rep, she would not give her name, kept talking instead of listening, kept telling me that after I changed my "pass through/pop mail" to gmail account; I would not be getting any mail sent to my domain from yahoo... but I did. Then to after getting very angry asking to speak to someone else, the btich hung up on me. DONE DONE DONE, STICK A FORK IN ME I AM DONE... After six years of this ###!

T0 the Z57 Client development team:

Good job of presenting us with Good Cop-Bad Cop routine. I bet you know full well who J Howley is. Either way it is nothing that any one can prove short of hiring a fleet of lawyers. How convenient.

Z57 ripped me off and I still have the emails from Paul Lamotte suggesting I should give him my log-ins. Only an idiot would give up their MLS LogIns. The MLSs prohibit members from doing that specifically. As if you guys didnt know that - well maybe you dont if you catch my implication.

And I quote Paul Lamotte
"are you able to give me the user and password for that agent long in section so i can look around to pull a link off of that?"

You got plenty of feedback from me and yet you NEVER privided me with any real service. Everything I said in my preivious post on this site still stands. Offering up an apology for past bad conduct does not make up for that conduct. It only shows me how despicable and unethical you people really are. I can walk outside and get clean hot air.

CalCon17

To Wayneloux,

We know your post is a few months old, but saw a new posting today that we felt we must jump in.

First off… we do NOT agree with the opinions of J Howley. We’ve looked through our files and Howley is not an employee (past or current) or a customer (past or current). Howley’s comments are inappropriate, rude and completely uncalled for. Howley - we don’t know who you are, but please stop with the name calling. Also, we see the posting from Imvu and do not agree with their position either.

The Complaint Board is set up for customers to share their opinions - good and bad. And while it hurts to hear the bad – we needed to hear it. Frankly, we have taken everyone’s feedback very seriously and are rolling out new changes at Z57 that we hope will be the first step towards improving your perception of Z57. While we cannot repair all of the mistakes of the past – we want to improve and are making serious changes here. And we welcome your continued feedback as we strive to improve. Hopefully we can win your business back. But regardless, we want you to know that we heard you and we are changing.
Here’s what we are doing:

Our Cancellation Policy
We want to apologize. Sometimes policies get in the way of offering good client service and it appears we are guilty of that. Z57 prides itself on successful working with thousands of Realtors to grow their Internet marketing for past 12 years. It wasn’t our intention to make it this so challenging to cancel our services and we don’t want to force Realtors to continue with a product if they have changed their mind after hanging up the phone.

Therefore, effective immediately, any new client can cancel their Z57 services within 3 days of purchase – for any reason – and get a full refund. If it’s after 3 days, a client may cancel at any time with 30 days notice. Simply call us at [protected]. Yes, we will still ask you why you want to cancel. But understand that’s only so we can improve our product and services to better suit your needs. We want to offer Realtor’s the best service possible.

Our Traffic Guarantee
We received a lot of feedback regarding our Traffic Guarantee. We take pride in the products we deliver and we would never intentionally create an offer that clients felt misled by. We were surprised by the feedback and pulled together our resources to make changes.

So effective immediately, we have removed the Traffic Guarantee and are replacing it with a new program: the Z57 Academy. The Z57 Academy is a comprehensive program that teaches Realtors how to be successful with Internet marketing. Through these five one-on-one courses, Realtors learn how to harness the Internet and Z57 services to maximize their marketing and take advantage of every opportunity to generate traffic, which converts to leads and ultimately– transactions.

We have a lot of experience making Realtors successful online and felt that these courses would offer our clients more value and more back-end support. At the end of the courses, Realtor’s earn a Z-Pro certification for their marketing and will give them access to additional Z57 resources. For a limited time, we are offering these classes free to Z57 clients so if you are interested in enrolling in the academy, simply call us at [protected] to schedule your first course. Also, any existing clients who are currently under the traffic guarantee may immediately switch to the Z57 Academy if they choose to.

I know its a few months too late and we have lost your business. That's our loss. But we did want you to know we heard you, we are making changes and we are grateful for the feedback so we can improve our services.

And J Howley – we don’t know who you are, but please stop insulting people who simply want share their opinions. If we didn’t get feedback, we couldn’t improve.

Z57 Client Development Team

You real estate agents are not too smart. The next time I call...shut up, give me your credit card # and I will give you the best product/website in the industry. Don't trust these other companies. Steve Weber is a brilliant man and you are lucky to hear one of the sales people when we call. You know you just are not smart enough to understand the way a website works or how to read a contract. Trust the experts. I am so tired of hearing all the complaining. Suck it up, take the call and pay your damn bill. Enough with this nonsense!

Who comes on a complaint board to sing praises for a company that is as fraudulent as Z57! Just google Z57 and you will find page after page of SCAM alerts. If you google Wise Agent, Top Pruducer, Agent Office, Real e Seller you won't find this level of complaints hummmm. So IMVU I think we know what kind of job you have, stealing money from hard working realtors, maybe you need a real job instead of damage control for Z57. It not about us being cheap, it's what we call customer service, and the difference between right and wrong. If you need to come on a complaint board to say good things about Z57 the pressure must be getting to you! Talk about Karma I can't wait to see what comes back around on you. Any one interested the attorney general is investigating Z57 I am sure they would like to hear more stories. IMVU If you have to work this hard to steal my money I know I make alot more dough than you.

shame on you people for not reading the terms and conditions. have you heard the phrase "if it sounds too good to be true it probably is"... take a lesson from your mother and know that if your going to spend $49-$99 on marketing monthly YOU WILL HAVE TO WORK. who the eff thinks they are going to get quality leads for the price of a good dinner. if you real estate agents honestly believed that then your all [censor]s. with that being said z57 does provide an amazing customer support team that will help you map out a marketing plan and help you get started but they wont do everything for you. i havent worked with one other company that will sit and teach you how to market on craigslist for an hour for free! basically if you people werent so busy pinching pennies and actually invested in GOOD marketing strategies $99 wouldnt seem like the end of the world because you'd actually be making real money.

bottom line real estate agents are lazy, they want the world but dont want to lift a finger for it. this market is karma, go get a real job chumps.

I had the same issue - lousy website. I cancelled back in June but they still kept charging my account. Apparently when I originally called to cancel they said they had given me the option to sell my website to a friend or work mate. Why would I sell something that is worthless to a friend! They never told me this. They say they will not refund my money that they have charged since my original cancellation. I have put in a complaint to the BBB. I also got the stupid fake e-mail leads. This is a scam!

T0 the Z57 Client development team:

Good job of presenting us with Good Cop-Bad Cop routine. I bet you know full well who J Howley is. Either way it is nothing that any one can prove short of hiring a fleet of lawyers. How convenient.

Z57 ripped me off and I still have the emails from Paul Lamotte suggesting I should give him my log-ins. Only an idiot would give up their MLS LogIns. The MLSs prohibit members from doing that specifically. As if you guys didnt know that - well maybe you dont if you catch my implication.

And I quote Paul Lamotte
"are you able to give me the user and password for that agent long in section so i can look around to pull a link off of that?"

You got plenty of feedback from me and yet you NEVER privided me with any real service. Everything I said in my preivious post on this site still stands. Offering up an apology for past bad conduct does not make up for that conduct. It only shows me how despicable and unethical you people really are. I can walk outside and get clean hot air.

CalCon17

Johnadler22 -

We know this post is rather dated, but we saw a new posting today that we felt we must address.

First off… we do NOT agree with the opinions of J Howley. We’ve looked through our files and Howley is not an employee (past or current) or a customer (past or current). Howley’s comments are inappropriate, rude and completely uncalled for. Howley - we don’t know who you are, but please stop with the name calling.

The Complaint Board is set up for customers to share their opinions - good and bad. And while it hurts to hear the bad – we needed to hear it. Frankly, we have taken everyone’s feedback very seriously and are rolling out new changes at Z57 that we hope will be the first step towards improving your perception of Z57. While we cannot repair all of the mistakes of the past – we want to improve and are making serious changes here. And we welcome your continued feedback as we strive to improve. Hopefully we can win your business back. But regardless, we want you to know that we heard you and we are changing.
Here’s what we are doing:

Our Traffic Guarantee
We received a lot of feedback regarding our Traffic Guarantee. While Z57 has consistently delivered the traffic we promised, we found that not everyone understood what traffic meant and what the guarantee truly delivered.
We are grateful for the feedback on the social wire. Z57 has built its business working with thousands of Realtors for more than 12 years; we take pride in the products we deliver and we would never intentionally create an offer that clients didn’t understand or felt misled by. We were surprised by the feedback and pulled together our resources to make changes.

Effective immediately, we have removed the Traffic Guarantee and are replacing it with a new program: the Z57 Academy. The Z57 Academy is a comprehensive program that teaches Realtors how to be successful with Internet marketing. Through these five one-on-one courses, Realtors learn how to harness the Internet and Z57 services to maximize their marketing and take advantage of every opportunity to generate traffic, which converts to leads and ultimately– transactions.
We have a lot of experience making Realtors successful online and felt that these courses would offer our clients more value and more back-end support. At the end of the courses, Realtor’s earn a ZPro certification for their marketing and will give them access to additional Z57 resources. For a limited time, we are offering these classes free to Z57 clients so if you are interested in enrolling in the Z57 academy, simply call us at [protected] to schedule your first course. Also, any existing clients who are currently under the traffic guarantee may immediately switch to the Z57 Academy if they choose to.

Beyond our traffic guarantee, there are several other programs and activities that we are working on to improve at Z57. But in fairness to your post, we don’t want to dominate the conversation. However, we did want you to know we heard you, we are making changes and we are grateful for the feedback so we can improve our services.

Lastly - J Howley – we don’t know who you are, but please stop insulting people who simply want share their opinions. If we didn’t get feedback, we couldn’t improve.

Z57 Client Development Team

You people are not too smart. Z57 is the best internet company out there. When you pick up the phone to speak to one of the reps, they have the patience to deal with how little you know about the internet and how to market. ihouseweb is a joke as is AccessDirect, and all the other companies trying to pretend to know how to handle a real estate agent and create an effective website. My advice to all of you who are complaining-when you talk to Z57 reps, be quiet and listen. They are far smarter then you are and are only trying to help. Those of you who have billing issues...are you sure you know how to read a contract or use a calculator? Just trust Z57. Henry-you are the man! Steve Webber is a genius and is only trying to help the unintelligent real estate agents stay in business

Please see my blog and the accompanying comment... I think you'll appreciate it. (and feel free to add on, we're on the same page)

http://holbrookcanhelp.wordpress.com/2011/01/19/an-ethical-dilemma/

They are not only giving you folks issues, but, in my opinion, are using job seekers for information and advice and never hiring. Maybe I'm wrong, but when the same ad for a director of marketing is posted on craigslist / san diego for nearly a year and on a daily basis...

My experience with Z57 was not good. They charge a lot of $ for a template web site were it take them a few minutes to fill in the blanks and up load. They do nothing to position you in a good spot under real estate google search trulia was a good touch but with every comment passed on their were a lot of responders. I never received a direct viable lead. I paid a lot of money. They are still taking, unauthorized, funds out of my account months later. Z 57 is a battle and I need my money and to spend time working. Be careful. Alan Pierce

I agree totally with the complaints! They take your and do nothing.

Looking for an excellent alternative to your current real estate website or if you are looking to establish your web presence, I suggest taking a look at http://www.MyEliteSite.net

My experience has been very similar to Jeremiah’s. I have been extremely disappointed with Z57’s support. They have a very strong sales team that makes everything look good, but they don’t deliver the support they say they do. When you call their center for help they do their absolute best to get you off the phone as soon as possible without really being any help.

Z57’s real business seems to be selling their services. They are fast to try to up-sell one of their products, but are nowhere to be found to when it comes to delivering what that say.

Today, I had a person from Z57’s Traffic Department call me to try to up-sell me one of their traffic packages. When I told him how unhappy I was with the Z57 product I had, he told me it was my problem because of my negative attitude and hung up on me. When I called to complain I was passed to a voice mailbox and have never heard back from Z57.

For the price there are lots of other options out there. I would strongly recommend not doing business with Z57.

All that sounds good on paper, all z57 offers is unique visitors...not leads. They have been in business a long time but so have many bad companies. I read another complaint board this guys who said he gets 1, 000 visitors a month and was proud of it. The funny thing is he never mentioned what percentage he converted to leads or if they turned into an actual transaction. It's funny when I canceled the sales guy told me the exact same thing, one of his clients... It's like Jeremiah just wrote about the sexiest sports car, I have news for him even with gas the car can still sit in the drive way. It's these cheese used car salesman tactics that they use. Don't fall for it, most of these companies are horrible. They'll say anything to make a sale and further more I would go as far to say that most of these guys are failed real estate agents. SO DON'T PICK A COMPANY BECAUSE THEY OFFER 60 VISITORS . I learned the hard way and read the fine print, the 60 days doesn't start till the 1st of the month. And right when they see that their time is running out all of the sudden out of nowhere you got your 60 visitors, a few bad leads and nothing to show for it.

Hi, my name is Jeremiah and I am the new Director of Service for Z57. I am also some what new to social media and blogs like this, so I apologize in advance for any missteps I may make by just diving in. But diving in is the best way I know to get things resolved. So here it goes…..

For johnadler22

I will do my best to keep this short and to the point, but by doing this I am in no way trying to be curt or discount your poor experience with us. My goal is only to provide additional insight.

We offer a guaranty based on the number of unique visitors to the site. To my knowledge, we are one of the only companies in the industry to offer a guaranty of any sort. We know that target market traffic (unique visitors that are looking to buy or sell in your area) provide target market leads and target market leads in the right hands turn into profitable transactions.

What we work so diligently to provide our customers is a website that turns those unique visitors into actual leads for the agent. I mean, we put lead capture all over the site and we do it in a way that doesn’t clutter up the site. That way you have a professional online presence that draws people in and works to convert them to leads, leads that you would not have otherwise received.

There are a couple of very important things to call out here.
1) Our sites typically convert traffic to leads at fairly high rate, usually between 5% - 10%.
2) The majority of our customers have worked with our On Demand team to learn how to customize their site. By customizing for their niche market or optimizing their site they increase their individual conversion rate.
3) You need traffic! Traffic is the life blood of a website like this. Better yet, think of the website like a sports car. It might be the sexiest sports car in the world, but if you don’t put gas in it, it’s just going to sit in your garage. You may have fully optimized your site or have content that is important to customers in your market, but unless they know where to look, no one will come to your site, and if no one comes to your site you wont get any leads.
4) Traffic for your site is all around you, you just need to know how to attract the visitors that you want. You can pay for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you can post on Craigslist for free with a link to your site, you can have your site on your business cards and other media that you send out to your community, you can have a Tommy Bahama sample sale at an open house sponsored by you and of course, your website. There are a million ways to drive traffic to your site! The more traffic, the more leads, the more leads, the more sales.
5) Sometimes people give bogus lead information. So say you get someone to your site, and their looking around, maybe they want to compare home prices or look for a 3, 2 in particular area and a lead conversion form pops up. You know that most people in the market today take 6 months to find a house, and sometimes they’re just not ready to give you their information yet. So they put in bogus info to continue on your site. Although that is not ideal, if you have worked on your site it will offer something that speaks to them and even though they may not have given you real info this time, the chances are pretty good that when they are ready, they’re going to look for the site that was so good and user friendly the first time.

Well it looks like I failed to be short and concise! If you have other questions please feel free to contact our On Demand team at [protected] anytime between 6:30 and 4:30 PST…. Our peak hours are of course between 9am and 2pm so if you call outside of those times you’re sure to get through more quickly. Thanks for your time and thanks for reading through this.

~Jeremiah

T0 the Z57 Client development team:

Good job of presenting us with Good Cop-Bad Cop routine. I bet you know full well who J Howley is. Either way it is nothing that any one can prove short of hiring a fleet of lawyers. How convenient.

Z57 ripped me off and I still have the emails from Paul Lamotte suggesting I should give him my log-ins. Only an idiot would give up their MLS LogIns. The MLSs prohibit members from doing that specifically. As if you guys didnt know that - well maybe you dont if you catch my implication.

And I quote Paul Lamotte
"are you able to give me the user and password for that agent long in section so i can look around to pull a link off of that?"

You got plenty of feedback from me and yet you NEVER privided me with any real service. Everything I said in my preivious post on this site still stands. Offering up an apology for past bad conduct does not make up for that conduct. It only shows me how despicable and unethical you people really are. I can walk outside and get clean hot air.

CalCon17

To Realtor1234,

We know your post is dated, but saw a new posting today that we felt we must jump in.

First off… we do NOT agree with the opinions of J Howley. We’ve looked through our files and Howley is not an employee (past or current) or a customer (past or current). Howley’s comments are inappropriate, rude and completely uncalled for. Howley - we don’t know who you are, but please stop with the name calling.

The Complaint Board is set up for customers to share their opinions - good and bad. And while it hurts to hear the bad – we needed to hear it. Frankly, we have taken everyone’s feedback very seriously and are rolling out new changes at Z57 that we hope will be the first step towards improving your perception of Z57. While we cannot repair all of the mistakes of the past – we want to improve and are making serious changes here. And we welcome your continued feedback as we strive to improve. Hopefully we can win your business back. But regardless, we want you to know that we heard you and we are changing.
Here’s what we are doing:

Our Cancellation Policy
We want to apologize. Sometimes policies get in the way of offering good client service and it appears we are guilty of that. Z57 prides itself on successful working with thousands of Realtors to grow their Internet marketing for past 12 years. It wasn’t our intention to make it this so challenging to cancel our services and we don’t want to force Realtors to continue with a product if they have changed their mind after hanging up the phone.

Therefore, effective immediately, any new client can cancel their Z57 services within 3 days of purchase – for any reason – and get a full refund. If it’s after 3 days, a client may cancel at any time with 30 days notice. Simply call us at [protected]. Yes, we will still ask you why you want to cancel. But understand that’s only so we can improve our product and services to better suit your needs. We want to offer Realtor’s the best service possible.

Our Traffic Guarantee
We received a lot of feedback regarding our Traffic Guarantee. We take pride in the products we deliver and we would never intentionally create an offer that clients felt misled by. We were surprised by the feedback and pulled together our resources to make changes.

So effective immediately, we have removed the Traffic Guarantee and are replacing it with a new program: the Z57 Academy. The Z57 Academy is a comprehensive program that teaches Realtors how to be successful with Internet marketing. Through these five one-on-one courses, Realtors learn how to harness the Internet and Z57 services to maximize their marketing and take advantage of every opportunity to generate traffic, which converts to leads and ultimately– transactions.

We have a lot of experience making Realtors successful online and felt that these courses would offer our clients more value and more back-end support. At the end of the courses, Realtor’s earn a ZPro certification for their marketing and will give them access to additional Z57 resources. For a limited time, we are offering these classes free to Z57 clients so if you are interested in enrolling in the academy, simply call us at [protected] to schedule your first course. Also, any existing clients who are currently under the traffic guarantee may immediately switch to the Z57 Academy if they choose to.

I know its a few months too late and we have lost your business. But we did want you to know we heard you, we are making changes and we are grateful for the feedback so we can improve our services.

And J Howley – we don’t know who you are, but please stop insulting people who simply want share their opinions. If we didn’t get feedback, we couldn’t improve.

Z57 Client Development Team

So tired of you idiotic real estate agents. Learn how to read a contract and be thankful Z57 is there to hold your hand and keep you in business. I think they would have to show you how to wipe your own ### as well.

PURE SCAM...liars...everything they will tell you is worded in a way to trick you. SERIOUSLY...do not be stupid (like me). Do your research and not on the web-pages that they send you to. Just Google search with the words [Z57 SCAM}. Start there. There will be pages of the same story. There are 100's of posts from people who have been ripped off by this company. I'm mad at myself for having to learn the lesson (IF IT'S TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE...IT ISN'T). Any Realtor who believes that they are going to close business from leads from Z-57 is dreaming. DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH...DO NOT BELIEVE A WORD THIS COMPANY SAYS.

I had a Z57 website for a number of months and found their communication to be sub-par. Although I liked the quality of the site overall and did get some leads from working it there definitely were things about it I would have changed if I could. When first working with them to get it set up, communication was dismal. Once it was up and running, I was pretty much doing things on my own anyway so it was okay. I was then solicited by Superlative, LLC websites which offered an initial set up for $99 (as opposed to $299) then a monthly fee of $29.95 (as opposed to $99) for a site that is just as good and in many ways better than Z57. Even though I cancelled my contract with Z57 more than a month ago I was just billed another $60 for having several listings promoted on Trulia because I mistakenly thought I had turned off that feature prior to leaving Z57. Turns out they were on auto-renewal and you had to do a more complicated process to get them to stop. Not happy with them at all and definitely don't recommend them.

Good luck getting anything from them. I had the same charges you did to design then $99 monthly fee. After I discovered how horrible they were I tried to cancel. Numerous e-mails and voicemails, no they make you talke to a live person who switches to another and so on and so on. Took me 3 months to finally get it cancelled, had to change my charge card even. Our last conversation was that the account was cancelled and I would no longer be billed for the 3 months I was trying to cancel. Then today, 7 months later I received a call from a collection agency on behalf of Z57 to collect $296. Stay far, far away from this company. If you are with them and want to cancel, get mean its the only way to get free of them.

PURE SCAM...liars...everything they will tell you is worded in a way to trick you. SERIOUSLY...do not be stupid (like me). Do your research and not on the web-pages that they send you to. Just Google search with the words [Z57 SCAM}. Start there. There will be pages of the same story. There are 100's of posts from people who have been ripped off by this company. I'm mad at myself for having to learn the lesson (IF IT'S TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE...IT ISN'T). Any Realtor who believes that they are going to close business from leads from Z-57 is dreaming. DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH...DO NOT BELIEVE A WORD THIS COMPANY SAYS.