ChitownLiving | Chicago Real Estate + Life

I’m addicted to spam, and I’m not talking about the mystery meat that comes in a tin can. In the Chicago real estate market we are all being spammed. As a real estate agent, it used to be that just our clients complained of spam. Going onto one of our agent websites to do a simple property search was a guarantee of receiving countless emails without the opportunity to initially opt out. This trend has picked up dramatically within the last year and now includes real estate agents spamming other real estate agents. Now real estate agents are spamming real estate agents as never before in order to increase a listing’s exposure. I can trace the trend back to one innocent email sent from an agent in a small Chicago brokerage to market a very “unique” 1 bed/1 bath condo in a downtown highrise. The service they used was Email Flyers. For a one time fee you can create an online flyer and blast it out to an email distribution list … say the entire Chicago Association of Realtors (CAR) email distribution list. I could envision the light bulbs going on in real estate agent’s heads across the Chicago area. Other email marketing services such as eCampaignPro were soon to follow. Soon my inbox was filled daily with such info as new listings, price changes, open houses, broker open houses, [fill in the blank], etc. I thought we had the local MLSNI listing system to handle these events but I guess you can never communicate too much. The problem I have is that I am addicted to these things. I open every one of them … that’s right, I open them but I don’t read most. I often hit the delete key before I even get a chance to read the subject line. There is so much noise out there that the urgent and news worthy email notifications are in danger of being treated as non-events. Kind of like screaming fire one too many times in a crowded movie theatre. This is a real shame. That’s it. I am off the soapbox so spam away.