As you may or may not know, I am a bit of a perennial fantasist. I have a fantasy of moving to Sonoma – Healdsburg, particularly, but probably only because I have visited it, I think any of those little towns in the middle of wine country would do, really. We could live in a restored Victorian and I would have a cute little shop with hardwoods and big windows and I would sell paper and weird little toys from Japan, and $40 tubes of hand cream, and in the back I could have a little letterpress studio and maybe I could teach or something. I have versions of this fantasy for Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Madison, and even sometimes Austin.

(Obviously I am quite far off from being able to teach letterpress but I would like to, maybe, at some point, because it’s so hard to find some place to learn)

ANYWAY, around December, a girl I know (she would be a frenemy if we were friends, or she knew I existed, but she doesn’t, so we’ll just think of her as a girl who has a blog that I read, but I don’t really like her, and don’t pretend that you don’t do the same thing) talked about buying a vacation home in Healdsburg. Instantly jealous, I read on, and she revealed that it was much less expensive than she had first supposed.

So, curious, I decided to look up the MLS in Healdsburg and see what was what. Is this an achievable dream? I’m going to come into some money once Phil kicks it, and I would like to plan my spending in advance. However, I soon discovered that every realtor had apparently made some kind of secret hide-the-listings pact, and I couldn’t view anything without signing up with one of them, so I kind of just picked one at random and joined, browsed the listings (well out of our price range, but with a lot of life insurance and a cheap hitman, maybe doable).

Every day for the next two weeks I got email from this realtor. I thought it was some kind of spam/mailing list from them, but I eventually realised that the realtor was emailing me every day. I wrote him back and said, thanks but no thanks, not going to move in the next year. The emails slowed down, but still came about once a week, and finally I got the threatening notice that my account was going to be deleted if I didn’t respond. I don’t care if my account is deleted, so I just ignored it. I haven’t been on the site since I registered six months ago.

Since then the emails have taken a kind of passive aggressive turn, the most recent being, “I ASSUME YOU WANT YOUR ACCOUNT DELETED??” and I imagine the body something like, “I THOUGHT WE HAD A GOOD THING BUT I GUESS YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT ME ANYMORE? WHAT ABOUT THE GOOD TIMES? I HAVE A 900 SQ FT COTTAGE TWO BLOCKS FROM TOWN CENTER PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO ME!”

So, open letter, if you’re going to make people register to use your site, don’t harass them after they’ve already told you that they’re not interested. Save your weird guilt trips and passive aggressive notes for your spouse, and don’t be surprised that 90% of the people that sign up don’t become customers. The internet is full of looky loos who will jump through your stupid hoops to get information, but have no interest in purchasing. In fact, forcing people to sign up is a waste of your time if you plan on personally handling each such “lead”. Instead you should have the option for people to sign up AFTER viewing, because at least those people are genuinely interested in what you have.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 5:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.