Dear Real Estate Agents,

Since my letter went out about StreetEasy’s greed (If you missed it, see here) the positive response from you has been overwhelming. We are all in agreement that we need to mobilize and fight this greedy bully. StreetEasy thinks they’re the only game in town, but they messed with the wrong agents. And it will be the agents that ultimately bring them down.

In fact, have you seen what happened? The rental listings on StreetEasy’s site declined over 50% today! The number of listings went from 30K to 15K overnight! Good work team!

So, where do we go from here? We have some ideas on how to get started. First of all, we need to have a place where we can relate and communicate with each other. From there, we come up with a more direct plan on how to stand together. Coordination is key.

With this in mind, we’ve taken two steps that we hope will mark the beginning of the end for GreedEasy:

A Closed Facebook Group for Updates and Communication with Fellow Real Estate Professionals. Join Here
We created a closed Facebook Group where we can all talk about what is going on and how to deal with it.  If you have any problem with access, let me know! To start things off, we are asking agents a poll question: What percent of your rental listings do you plan to keep on StreetEasy?

Follow us @dumpstreeteasy and let’s get the message out!
We’ve unleashed @dumpstreeteasy on Twitter and encourage all of you to follow and engage. The more attention and press this campaign gets, the better the chance that consumers will flock to alternate places to “search.”

StreetEasy pretends this is all “in the best interests of the consumer.” Does anyone really believe that? They are just a website. The listings are what really matter. No listings? No traffic. We think you all concur, judging by the responses like these we’ve been receiving since this campaign kicked-off:

“StreetEasy has miscalculated and I think will be worse off because of it.”

“We made them now they put the screws on us……..”

“As you well know, I was the first to leave StreetEasy about a year ago. You forget that it is also dishonest greed-the worst kind.”

“I could not agree with you more with regards to StreetEasy’s approach and deceptive practices that are being implemented at their affiliated websites as well, Zillow, Trulia, Hotpads, etc…”

“I wholeheartedly agree with all of what you say here. And can’t believe how the industry is taking it lying down.”

“Are you guys keeping the Leasebreak name if you’re planning to move to the main rental market and compete with the GodZillow monster?”

On that last comment, we will have some news on that front in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Let’s do this!

Phil Horigan
Dedicated NYC Real Estate Agent for 13 Years
Founder, Leasebreak.com

Author

Philip Horigan is the founder of Leasebreak.com - a leading marketplace for rentals in NYC, founded in 2013. He launched Frēlē - a more comprehensive NYC rental marketplace - in May 2018 with a 4 point pledge (www.frele.com/pledge). Phil has been a New York City real estate agent for 14 years working for some of the top firms in the city. He became an independent broker in early 2017 so that he can focus more on his entrepreneurial endeavors. Phil believes strongly in building businesses in an ethical and transparent way.

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