7 ms·

Forewarn gives realtors access to buyers' histories with a phone number

79 points by compootr 2y ago

bell-cot 2y ago
> Although some real estate agents say the financial information it returns saves time when finding clients most likely to have the budget for the houses they’re looking at, most agents and associations tout it primarily as a safety tool because it also supplies criminal records. > In addition to those records, the product — owned by the data broker red violet — also supplies a given individual’s address history; phone, vehicle and property records; bankruptcies; and liens and judgements, including foreclosure histories. > “It can be real creepy and you have to swear that you’re not going to use it in a wrong manner,” Hicks added, referring to Forewarn rules which say real estate agents can’t share data from the app publicly or with third parties, or use the app to pull information on non-professional contacts. And with ~1.5M Realtors in the US, working for ~1/3M real estate firms, you know there will only be a trivial number of cases where it this product is misused...right?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mysterydip 2y ago
  But they pinky promised to not misuse it!
- criddell 2y ago
  Where’s the tool for buyers? If I’m going to go to an empty home with a person I don’t really know, I’d like to know their criminal history. Before I sign a contract with a realtor, maybe it would make sense for me to know that my agent isn’t in financial trouble.
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    Where do you draw the line though? So many situations in life where you are in a room with someone you don't really know. Eventually you have to go on blind faith for better or worse, because there's no time to vet each and every person you encounter.
    - bagels 2y ago
      Just need your AR glasses to facial recognition scan everyone in the room and feed you data about them.
  - seadan83 2y ago
    There are some legit things to want to know about realtors. How many homes did they pressure people into whom then had various issues they needed to deal with? Or, did the realtor truly find a good fit for the buyer? How about conflicts of interest? As an anecdote, my neighbors recently were screwed by a realtor that pressured them into a place where they then needed to drop 150k on repairs (about 15% total value). That same realtor was pressuring our HOA president to literally make up information for the resale information so that the forms could be handed back to the realtor just a couple days sooner. Of course all liability would have been on the HOA president and not the realtor. With that said, a good history of what the realtor has sold before, & how the homebuyers felt about it would be a great tool..
throitallaway 2y ago
This type of stuff is a prime example of our laws lagging behind technology. All these companies that hoover up personal information and sell it on the gray market should be regulated out of existence. Does the EU stand for this type of thing?
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  The writeup said this is all public information, even if personal. Do we really want government bureaucrats being the only ones with access to your conviction records??
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    > Do we really want government bureaucrats being the only ones with access to your conviction records?? I sense a tone of sarcastic incredulity in this question but... yes? If you want to run background checks on people that's one thing, but A) it should cost money if for no other reason than to stop people scraping other's information for no reason, B) it should only be accessible if you can provide a justification for why you need that information, like you're trying to hire someone for a job or something. Like in a minority of cases, for example the sex offender registry[1] comes to mind, I can understand why the public has an interest in having that information be readily available. For your average Joe Blow with a parking ticket or who stole a beer once? If he's done his time, leave him be. 1: Of course that system has all kinds of it's own issues but that's another conversation.
  - mywittyname 2y ago
    As someone who works with the data from some of the vendors outlined in this article (and many others), I can confidently say, this data is not just public records, and the term "public records" is used to be deliberately obscure. What they really mean is the data that you give to other companies. It could be public records, such as real estate records, it could be "public" in the sense of details you publish online yourself, such as on LinkedIn or Facebook, or it could be details like who you bank with, the approximate values in each account, or what you like to spend your money on. This is one of those things some people are okay with, up until the point where they get bitten by it. It's weird enough when someone sends you a congratulations on your new baby when you haven't told anyone, but it's really weird when you get the same congratulations for the baby didn't have. Except replace "having a baby" with "went to prison." I think even you'd be upset if you started losing out on job opportunities because one of these services confused you with a convict of a similar name or address. Or your neighbors start dealing in scuttlebutt regarding something from these platforms.
error54 2y ago
> saying it would be unethical to only use Forewarn’s data to determine whom to work with. As part of her job, Hicks is responsible for ensuring the realtors she manages are as financially successful as possible. So discrimination is ok because you know, we have to make as much money as possible
- erellsworth 2y ago
  Discrimination against who? The poors? Isn't that a major part of what banks do?
  - error54 2y ago
    Arbitrary discrimination. From the article: > “The real estate agent can essentially screen out people they don't want by saying, ‘Oh, this person drives a Ford truck and I only want to sell to high end people so I'm just gonna get rid of this customer'”
    - m463 2y ago
      "I want price insensitive folks bidding against each other!"
wewtyflakes 2y ago
Looks like they do not care about CCPA or GDPR. https://www.forewarn.com/opt-out-policy/ https://www.forewarn.com/opt-out-policy/
- radicaldreamer 2y ago
  People should report this company to California’s Office of the Attorney General, it should not be operating in California without respecting CCPA (and they cannot require a basis for your removal under CCPA).
  - willk 2y ago
    You can file a complaint here: https://www.cppa.ca.gov/webapplications/complaint https://www.cppa.ca.gov/webapplications/complaint
  - tzs 2y ago
    They say the information they are dealing in is information that is exempted under CCPA: > Importantly, FOREWARN’s products and services contain information that is collected, processed, sold, or disclosed subject to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), pursuant to the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994 (DPPA), and/or is considered publicly available information. Therefore, FOREWARN does not maintain processes for consumers to submit requests to FOREWARN under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) or any other state privacy law that exempts or excludes information subject to the GLBA or DPPA, or publicly available information
    - gwbas1c 2y ago
      I suspect that they're betting on a technicality that won't hold up. IE, if they're reporting on old publicly available data that's since been corrected, are they in compliance with the law?
- kabdib 2y ago
  Yeah, that's super slimy.
et-al 2y ago
Considering every online retailer asks for your phone number, I'm not surprised. The shopping history Shopify has one everyone is also a goldmine.
- reaperducer 2y ago
  I haven't put my real phone number into an online shopping checkout in close to 20 years. I've had problems exactly once, when an item sent was damaged in transit and returned to the mom-and-pop shop, and they couldn't get in touch with me. When I hadn't received the item two weeks after purchase, I called them and they happily sent a replacement.
janalsncm 2y ago
People genuinely have no idea how much information is out there about them. Not just from hacks but from “legitimate” sources like data brokers. Part of me thinks it would be a service for some newspaper to just publish a searchable website of all of it, so people can really feel the impact of it. It would be impossible to ignore. Or maybe just the info for all politicians in Washington. Of course, this would enable all of the bottom-feeding scammers to get it too, so it would probably do more harm than good.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- StanislavPetrov 2y ago
  >Part of me thinks it would be a service for some newspaper to just publish a searchable website of all of it, so people can really feel the impact of it. Unfortunately this service already exists, but is not as yet public. It's called XKeyscore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore
j-bos 2y ago
Haven't been able to find a deletion opt out for Red Violet specifically, but google did turn up this portal for one of their subsidiaries: https://www.ididata.com/deletion-request/ https://www.ididata.com/deletion-request/
- neilv 2y ago
  Thanks. It says "for California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, Oregon, Texas, and Montana residents only". The rest of us should talk with our state lawmakers?
- reaperducer 2y ago
  Haven't been able to find a deletion opt out for Red Violet specifically, but google did turn up this portal for one of their subsidiaries: Do these actually work, or are they yet another method of collecting information? Maybe I'm just jaded and skeptical.
kjkjadksj 2y ago
I am not sure why realtors haven't become obsolete in hot markets at least on the sellers side. 5% is a lot of money when your home is so valuable. Plus it's such a sellers market, where it seems like all the marketing you might have to do is put a listing with a couple terrible grainy photos on zillow and you will get 10 all cash offers by the end of the week. You don't even really need to bother with mls anymore which was the old artificial moat for the real estate profession. Buying side might be a different case, but at least as a seller I don't think you need to bother with taking nice photos, staging, marketing, hosting open houses, etc anymore. Times have changed.
- Carrok 2y ago
  As someone who recently (this month) bought a house in a hot market, the market is no longer anything like what you are describing. It is not necessarily a buyers market again yet, but it is definitely no longer a sellers market. Things are sitting on the market for weeks. They get one offer, not cash, under asking, and they take it. Times have changed.
  - uptown 2y ago
    Entirely regional. Houses near me are still under offer in days unless they have some critical flaw.
    - Carrok 2y ago
      Obviously these things are regional, but looking at it federally, there are more units listed now than there have been since before COVID. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ACTLISCOUUS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ACTLISCOUUS
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
- bequanna 2y ago
  It isn’t exactly trivial to sell FSBO, but it isn’t that difficult either. It does take small amount of effort and research plus the time to show the property yourself.
jachac 2y ago
Hilarious how it's terror and/or think of the children nearly every time a privacy busting product or law is being pushed through or justified. Attacks on Real Estate Agents: Be Prepared Last month, the attack on a real estate agent in Encino, California, was brought to light as the incident was caught on camera. While we have all heard stories regarding the increase in attacks on agents, seeing it happen live on video made it very real for many and greatly impacted the agent community. No one wants to go to work afraid, not knowing who they will encounter each day. Above is from Forewarn's blog https://www.forewarn.com/blog/attacks-on-real-estate-agents-be-prepared/ https://www.forewarn.com/blog/attacks-on-real-estate-agents-...
- giantrobot 2y ago
  > While we have all incorrect, exaggerated, or just plain made up stories regarding the increase in attacks on agents... There, fixed that for them.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
2four2 2y ago
I've just sent them a notice letter to delete my personal information under CA Consumer Privacy Act and they declined and I am pursuing further. If anyone would like to send a similar notice, it's very easy through https://yourdigitalrights.org/ https://yourdigitalrights.org/
Buttons840 2y ago
I used to work for a company that gathered data about doctor's licenses and sanctions. All 50 States do it a little different and I helped with scraping some of the data. Sometimes we would have to buy the lists of sanctioned doctors--think about that, a State putting the list of board sanctioned doctors behind a paywall. So, while every real estate agent has cheap and instant access to all this data, the public is behind a paywall to see which doctors have been sanctioned. Where did we go wrong?
- xethos 2y ago
  A lack of trust in government, a belief all government services should pay for themselves, a lack of anti-trust enforcement, a lack of regulation on abusive and overly-capitalistic companies, I could go on, but the list is basically what the average American seems to chide the EU for
  - wakawaka28 2y ago
    Government services don't necessarily need to pay for themselves but they do need to be justified and paid for. "I want that" is not adequate justification and "any cost is acceptable, just take it from the rich or the businesses" is not an adequate payment scheme.
StanislavPetrov 2y ago
This is obviously a terrible invasion of privacy, but that is not the only problem. Information on credit reports is routinely wrong, and there in many cases it is virtually impossible to remove. I've had some random addresses listed as "previous addresses" on my credit report for decades, and no matter what sort of letters I write or how many hoops I jump through, they remain. I got a new phone number last year, and still occasionally receive calls from whoever it was in South Carolina who previously had this number. What are the odds that a realtor is getting that person's data, instead of mine? What if you are on a family plan, it is a business phone, or registered in someone else's name? These may sound like edge cases but even if it is only 5% of people that's tens of millions of people in the USA alone who could potentially get screwed by this.

79 points by compootr 2y ago

> Although some real estate agents say the financial information it returns saves time when finding clients most likely to have the budget for the houses they’re looking at, most agents and associations tout it primarily as a safety tool because it also supplies criminal records. > In addition to those records, the product — owned by the data broker red violet — also supplies a given individual’s address history; phone, vehicle and property records; bankruptcies; and liens and judgements, including foreclosure histories. > “It can be real creepy and you have to swear that you’re not going to use it in a wrong manner,” Hicks added, referring to Forewarn rules which say real estate agents can’t share data from the app publicly or with third parties, or use the app to pull information on non-professional contacts. And with ~1.5M Realtors in the US, working for ~1/3M real estate firms, you know there will only be a trivial number of cases where it this product is misused...right?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mysterydip 2y ago
But they pinky promised to not misuse it!
criddell 2y ago
Where’s the tool for buyers? If I’m going to go to an empty home with a person I don’t really know, I’d like to know their criminal history. Before I sign a contract with a realtor, maybe it would make sense for me to know that my agent isn’t in financial trouble.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  Where do you draw the line though? So many situations in life where you are in a room with someone you don't really know. Eventually you have to go on blind faith for better or worse, because there's no time to vet each and every person you encounter.
  - bagels 2y ago
    Just need your AR glasses to facial recognition scan everyone in the room and feed you data about them.
- seadan83 2y ago
  There are some legit things to want to know about realtors. How many homes did they pressure people into whom then had various issues they needed to deal with? Or, did the realtor truly find a good fit for the buyer? How about conflicts of interest? As an anecdote, my neighbors recently were screwed by a realtor that pressured them into a place where they then needed to drop 150k on repairs (about 15% total value). That same realtor was pressuring our HOA president to literally make up information for the resale information so that the forms could be handed back to the realtor just a couple days sooner. Of course all liability would have been on the HOA president and not the realtor. With that said, a good history of what the realtor has sold before, & how the homebuyers felt about it would be a great tool..

throitallaway 2y ago

This type of stuff is a prime example of our laws lagging behind technology. All these companies that hoover up personal information and sell it on the gray market should be regulated out of existence. Does the EU stand for this type of thing?

readthenotes1 2y ago
The writeup said this is all public information, even if personal. Do we really want government bureaucrats being the only ones with access to your conviction records??
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  > Do we really want government bureaucrats being the only ones with access to your conviction records?? I sense a tone of sarcastic incredulity in this question but... yes? If you want to run background checks on people that's one thing, but A) it should cost money if for no other reason than to stop people scraping other's information for no reason, B) it should only be accessible if you can provide a justification for why you need that information, like you're trying to hire someone for a job or something. Like in a minority of cases, for example the sex offender registry[1] comes to mind, I can understand why the public has an interest in having that information be readily available. For your average Joe Blow with a parking ticket or who stole a beer once? If he's done his time, leave him be. 1: Of course that system has all kinds of it's own issues but that's another conversation.
- mywittyname 2y ago
  As someone who works with the data from some of the vendors outlined in this article (and many others), I can confidently say, this data is not just public records, and the term "public records" is used to be deliberately obscure. What they really mean is the data that you give to other companies. It could be public records, such as real estate records, it could be "public" in the sense of details you publish online yourself, such as on LinkedIn or Facebook, or it could be details like who you bank with, the approximate values in each account, or what you like to spend your money on. This is one of those things some people are okay with, up until the point where they get bitten by it. It's weird enough when someone sends you a congratulations on your new baby when you haven't told anyone, but it's really weird when you get the same congratulations for the baby didn't have. Except replace "having a baby" with "went to prison." I think even you'd be upset if you started losing out on job opportunities because one of these services confused you with a convict of a similar name or address. Or your neighbors start dealing in scuttlebutt regarding something from these platforms.

error54 2y ago

> saying it would be unethical to only use Forewarn’s data to determine whom to work with. As part of her job, Hicks is responsible for ensuring the realtors she manages are as financially successful as possible. So discrimination is ok because you know, we have to make as much money as possible

erellsworth 2y ago
Discrimination against who? The poors? Isn't that a major part of what banks do?
- error54 2y ago
  Arbitrary discrimination. From the article: > “The real estate agent can essentially screen out people they don't want by saying, ‘Oh, this person drives a Ford truck and I only want to sell to high end people so I'm just gonna get rid of this customer'”
  - m463 2y ago
    "I want price insensitive folks bidding against each other!"

wewtyflakes 2y ago

Looks like they do not care about CCPA or GDPR. https://www.forewarn.com/opt-out-policy/ https://www.forewarn.com/opt-out-policy/

radicaldreamer 2y ago
People should report this company to California’s Office of the Attorney General, it should not be operating in California without respecting CCPA (and they cannot require a basis for your removal under CCPA).
- willk 2y ago
  You can file a complaint here: https://www.cppa.ca.gov/webapplications/complaint https://www.cppa.ca.gov/webapplications/complaint
- tzs 2y ago
  They say the information they are dealing in is information that is exempted under CCPA: > Importantly, FOREWARN’s products and services contain information that is collected, processed, sold, or disclosed subject to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), pursuant to the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994 (DPPA), and/or is considered publicly available information. Therefore, FOREWARN does not maintain processes for consumers to submit requests to FOREWARN under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) or any other state privacy law that exempts or excludes information subject to the GLBA or DPPA, or publicly available information
  - gwbas1c 2y ago
    I suspect that they're betting on a technicality that won't hold up. IE, if they're reporting on old publicly available data that's since been corrected, are they in compliance with the law?
kabdib 2y ago
Yeah, that's super slimy.

et-al 2y ago

Considering every online retailer asks for your phone number, I'm not surprised. The shopping history Shopify has one everyone is also a goldmine.

reaperducer 2y ago
I haven't put my real phone number into an online shopping checkout in close to 20 years. I've had problems exactly once, when an item sent was damaged in transit and returned to the mom-and-pop shop, and they couldn't get in touch with me. When I hadn't received the item two weeks after purchase, I called them and they happily sent a replacement.

janalsncm 2y ago

People genuinely have no idea how much information is out there about them. Not just from hacks but from “legitimate” sources like data brokers. Part of me thinks it would be a service for some newspaper to just publish a searchable website of all of it, so people can really feel the impact of it. It would be impossible to ignore. Or maybe just the info for all politicians in Washington. Of course, this would enable all of the bottom-feeding scammers to get it too, so it would probably do more harm than good.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
StanislavPetrov 2y ago
>Part of me thinks it would be a service for some newspaper to just publish a searchable website of all of it, so people can really feel the impact of it. Unfortunately this service already exists, but is not as yet public. It's called XKeyscore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore

j-bos 2y ago

Haven't been able to find a deletion opt out for Red Violet specifically, but google did turn up this portal for one of their subsidiaries: https://www.ididata.com/deletion-request/ https://www.ididata.com/deletion-request/

neilv 2y ago
Thanks. It says "for California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, Oregon, Texas, and Montana residents only". The rest of us should talk with our state lawmakers?
reaperducer 2y ago
Haven't been able to find a deletion opt out for Red Violet specifically, but google did turn up this portal for one of their subsidiaries: Do these actually work, or are they yet another method of collecting information? Maybe I'm just jaded and skeptical.

kjkjadksj 2y ago

I am not sure why realtors haven't become obsolete in hot markets at least on the sellers side. 5% is a lot of money when your home is so valuable. Plus it's such a sellers market, where it seems like all the marketing you might have to do is put a listing with a couple terrible grainy photos on zillow and you will get 10 all cash offers by the end of the week. You don't even really need to bother with mls anymore which was the old artificial moat for the real estate profession. Buying side might be a different case, but at least as a seller I don't think you need to bother with taking nice photos, staging, marketing, hosting open houses, etc anymore. Times have changed.

Carrok 2y ago
As someone who recently (this month) bought a house in a hot market, the market is no longer anything like what you are describing. It is not necessarily a buyers market again yet, but it is definitely no longer a sellers market. Things are sitting on the market for weeks. They get one offer, not cash, under asking, and they take it. Times have changed.
- uptown 2y ago
  Entirely regional. Houses near me are still under offer in days unless they have some critical flaw.
  - Carrok 2y ago
    Obviously these things are regional, but looking at it federally, there are more units listed now than there have been since before COVID. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ACTLISCOUUS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ACTLISCOUUS
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
bequanna 2y ago
It isn’t exactly trivial to sell FSBO, but it isn’t that difficult either. It does take small amount of effort and research plus the time to show the property yourself.

jachac 2y ago

Hilarious how it's terror and/or think of the children nearly every time a privacy busting product or law is being pushed through or justified. Attacks on Real Estate Agents: Be Prepared Last month, the attack on a real estate agent in Encino, California, was brought to light as the incident was caught on camera. While we have all heard stories regarding the increase in attacks on agents, seeing it happen live on video made it very real for many and greatly impacted the agent community. No one wants to go to work afraid, not knowing who they will encounter each day. Above is from Forewarn's blog https://www.forewarn.com/blog/attacks-on-real-estate-agents-be-prepared/ https://www.forewarn.com/blog/attacks-on-real-estate-agents-...

giantrobot 2y ago
> While we have all incorrect, exaggerated, or just plain made up stories regarding the increase in attacks on agents... There, fixed that for them.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

2four2 2y ago

I've just sent them a notice letter to delete my personal information under CA Consumer Privacy Act and they declined and I am pursuing further. If anyone would like to send a similar notice, it's very easy through https://yourdigitalrights.org/ https://yourdigitalrights.org/

Buttons840 2y ago

I used to work for a company that gathered data about doctor's licenses and sanctions. All 50 States do it a little different and I helped with scraping some of the data. Sometimes we would have to buy the lists of sanctioned doctors--think about that, a State putting the list of board sanctioned doctors behind a paywall. So, while every real estate agent has cheap and instant access to all this data, the public is behind a paywall to see which doctors have been sanctioned. Where did we go wrong?

xethos 2y ago
A lack of trust in government, a belief all government services should pay for themselves, a lack of anti-trust enforcement, a lack of regulation on abusive and overly-capitalistic companies, I could go on, but the list is basically what the average American seems to chide the EU for
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  Government services don't necessarily need to pay for themselves but they do need to be justified and paid for. "I want that" is not adequate justification and "any cost is acceptable, just take it from the rich or the businesses" is not an adequate payment scheme.

StanislavPetrov 2y ago

This is obviously a terrible invasion of privacy, but that is not the only problem. Information on credit reports is routinely wrong, and there in many cases it is virtually impossible to remove. I've had some random addresses listed as "previous addresses" on my credit report for decades, and no matter what sort of letters I write or how many hoops I jump through, they remain. I got a new phone number last year, and still occasionally receive calls from whoever it was in South Carolina who previously had this number. What are the odds that a realtor is getting that person's data, instead of mine? What if you are on a family plan, it is a business phone, or registered in someone else's name? These may sound like edge cases but even if it is only 5% of people that's tens of millions of people in the USA alone who could potentially get screwed by this.