Have you ever experienced a real estate vendor who has either made it extremely difficult or impossible to cancel their service? Or have you had a product that you canceled continue to bill you for services? Agents sign up for a new product or trial, and then get caught in cancellation hell. But why do vendors make it a pain the rear to cancel? They are either too busy, too understaffed, too greedy, too incompetent, or sell a crappy product. There is no other reason to make it hard to cancel a product. Unfortunately, this is a common problem in the real estate industry.

If there is one thing I’ve learned, it is that satisfied customers will talk about your product, but unsatisfied customers will talk even more. They will go in to real estate groups on Facebook and talk about the nightmare experience, the bait and switch, and the cancellation hell. Why would a real estate vendor risk damaging their brand like this? Is the risk of losing tens, hundreds, or thousands of customers worth the extra $50 or $100 that they may get from a customer? Or is the risk not that bad, since there are hundreds of thousands of real estate agents out there for them to prey on?

Some smart agents have come up with a solution to the problem. To be honest, I don’t know where the idea came from, but it is genius. Some agents are buying prepaid credit cards with a small value on it, like $5. When you sign up for a trial of a service, it will only attempt to authorize a $1 charge. Of course, the card will say that it can hold that amount. However, if you are unable to cancel the account (or forget to cancel), the charge will not go through. This saves your bank account from being hit month after month with unauthorized charges.

Using a prepaid card does create an added step for the agent though. If you find a product that you like, you will need to update your billing data to a working credit card. If you forget to update it to a working card, your services may be canceled, you may have to pay an additional setup fee, or you may loose any information/leads/contacts that you had stored within that system. Most vendors make it much easier to update billing information than to cancel, so that extra step might be worth it to you.

Have you ever been stuck in cancellation hell or do you have any other methods you use to avoid unscrupulous vendors? Please share in the comments below.

[Photo via http://www.worksavelive.com/]