ePerks, the brand and company that exposed the world to Ben Behrouzi and his unethical business practices and inability to deliver services as promised has been hacked.

The ePerks brand had all but been abandoned in embarrassment when Ben Behrouzi and company lost their failed bid to take down blogger Vlad Zablotkyy’s blog, GoBeyondMLS.

When ePerks was exposed and Ben Behrouzi’s unethical business practices were given national attention in 2008, Ben changed the name of his original holding company from Brabus Ventures to DotNextInc due to the unflattering attention. Additionally, ePerks was no longer listed on the DotNextInc website as a Behrouzi owned company and his profile was removed from ePerks.com. Other companies listed in Behrouzi’s portfolio are Ziddler.com (landing page claimed Ziddler was “Launching Summer 2009″) which failed to launch and the ill fated iHype.com, another company that never got off the ground. Today Ben Behrouzi is at the helm of LeapFish, another company that expands on ePerk’s very questionable business model.

Hiya! BrokersScience has been quiet for the last year or so and that will be changing in the coming months. We’ve just rebuilt BrokerScience from the ground up. Sure, it doesn’t look like much has changed on the outside, but we’ve added some very cool new features.

BrokerScience Joins the LeadPress Mortgage Network

The first addition is that BrokerScience is the first blog to join the LeadPress Mortgage Network! What does that mean besides a new grey toolbar at the top of the page? It means that BrokerScience is now tied in with the LeadPress Campus. This means that BrokerScience activity streams show up on the LeadPress Campus and registration for BrokerScience is now handled via the LeadPress Campus. Registering for a LeadPress account means you get a neato profile page and the chance to meet others, learn and network.

New Faces in Mortgage Blogging

We’re also really excited to be adding some talented folks to the roster as well. We think the mortgage blogosphere could use quite a bit of work and we’re hoping that BrokerScience can be a new and exciting channel for mortgage and real estate peeps alike. In fact, if you know someone that you think might be a good addition to the team, ping us at trace at leadpress dot com.

New Author Pages and Sidebar Highlights

Another cool addition we’ve added is the ability to highlight our contributors. All contributors will have their own author page, author box (at  bottom of posts) and sidebar highlight (look to the right). The sidebar highlight is kind of nifty too because the newest contributors to post are automatically pushed to the top where they will likely get more eyeballs. These author boxes have a brief author bio and also point to the author’s website, BrokerScience posts, email and LeadPress profile. If you comment on BrokerScience, LeadPress Campus visitors can see your comments and may even join in the discussion. If you haven’t checked out the LeadPress Campus or the LeadPress Forums, now might be a good time! Things are a bit slow, but will be picking up as we add new features and build traffic.

Author Page Highlight Box

Sidebar Contributor Highlight

Have Feedback? What Would You Like to See That’s Different?

Have some ideas on a new feature or topic you would like to see? Let us know in the comments or contact us at the contact page above and you can always ping me at trace at leadpress with any feedback or questions!

LeadPress launched this week, offering mortgage lenders a much need premium option for establishing a superior online presence. The mortgage space is infamous for employing severely out of of date and sometimes tacky websites in the quest for generating mortgage leads. LeadPress fixes the problems exhibited by most mortgage websites today such as employing Full 1003 Applications (lead generation killers), tacky flash intro pages, poor designs / layouts, music and sound effects and many other user experience issues.

As many of you know, we’ve been hard at work on LeadPress for quite a while, so it’s great to finally launch and move into the space.

Learn more about LeadPress Mortgage Websites.

LeadPress is also paying a $250 referral fee through our Mortgage Affiliate Program, if this interests you, drop us a note or call! This is a great opportunity for mortgage / real estate industry facing websites, but a referral via word of mouth works just as well for getting the referral fee.

We did the Carpool Confessions series on LeadCritic with Mike Ferree.  We chatted about a lot of things including REBarCamp Los Angeles, Twitter acquisition rumors, mortgage leads and more.

Check it out here!

Wow! Yesterday was quite the blowout for Ben Behrouzi and DotNext Inc. First, TechCrunch stated the obvious and sad truth about LeapFish, then Ben and his employees were then caught red handed calling themselves “geniuses” in the comments section of the same article by IP address tracking and finally, Ben Behrouzi was reduced to name calling in front of the world on TechCrunch and on two articles on this blog.

Where does one go from such a melodic sequence of events that is music to the ears of anyone that has ever had the unfortunate experience of crossing paths with Ben Behrouzi? The truth is that there is nowhere to go. A little unknown blog with little to no traffic like BrokerScience can never accomplish what TechCrunch accomplished yesterday. More importantly, we’ve done more than our fair share of the heavy lifting in exposing Ben Behrouzi, ePerks, Leapfish and DotNextInc’s business practices. This means we are no longer going to be writing about Ben Behrouzi or any of his “companies”.

There is one main factor driving this decision: time. There are not enough hours in the day to work on my own projects and there are enough hours in the day to cover the Ben Behrouzi and his exploits. We simply have to pick and choose where our energy is going. You may have noticed we weren’t blogging much anyways over the past months except for Benham Behrouzi news when it occurred and that was again, due to time constraints. That is also the reason that there has been a disproportionate amount of Behrouzi coverage.

Read The Full Story »

Ben Behrouzi has hit an all time low for himself and his new startup LeapFish in front of Silicon Valley and the world. After Techcrunch declared LeapFish as “another meta search engine no one will ever use” his employees were caught red handed making shill comments praising LeapFish and calling it “genius”. Classic. This puts him on the fast track to destroy yet another brand in addition to his past casualties, ePerks, Brabus Ventures, and iHype.

Now Techcrunch knows what the rest of us have known for years. Ben Behrouzi, LeapFish and most of Ben’s companies are spammers. I’ve personally received ePerks and LeapFish spam and or phone calls. A former ePerks employee confided in me that Behrouzi employees are given free reign to use whatever techniques are necessary to hit their numbers.

Former Ben Behrouzi ePerks employee that wished to remain unnamed:

I graduated from USC, I never imagined I would be spamming for a living.

Read The Full Story »

On October 22nd, 2008, Ben Behrouzi / Eperks /LeapFish’s atorney, Ronald J. Cook filed for dismissal of their complaint against Vlad Zablotzkyy. This is yet one more embarrassment for Ben Behrouzi in addition to the public humiliation and ridicule that has already befallen him and his dieing brand ePerks, at the hands of the Real Estate community at large.

The withdrawal was likely the result of a settlement with Vlad (the terms of which have not been disclosed) in which Vlad was required to post a statement which is essentially a lawyer contrived “I’m Sorry”. One highlight is where “Vlad” requests that other bloggers covering the story print retractions. Vlad was outgunned and his willingness to settle clearly reflects that.

Considering that Ben Behhrouzi has threatened BrokerScience with threats similar to those he made against Vlad, we see this defeat as fitting, to say the least.

“Behnam “Ben” Behrouzi filed what’s called an “unverified” complaint against Vlad.  That’s in contrast to a “verified” complaint, in which the plaintiff signs the complaint and declares under penalty of perjury that the statements in the complaint are true and correct.  The lawsuit ended in settlement without Behrouzi ever making any statement under oath.  Specifically, he never denied that he was responsible for the slander of Vlad.” – Brief Submitted to BrokerScience by Source that Wished to Remain Anonymous

While most intelligent CEO’s couldn’t attract the kind of bad publicity and ill will Behrouzi has managed to generate for ePerks on their worst day, this is an area where Ben truly shines. Then again, Ben has proven himself to be a tactless bully time and time again, so this is par for the course.

Read The Full Story »

School is out for summer, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t work to be done. I would like to revisit one of the simplest, yet most powerful tools for progressing in your career and life: Setting Goals.

That’s right, we all know about goal setting, realize the importance that setting goals can bring to measuring and assessing success and progress and yet many of us are not consistently setting and measuring our progress towards goals. I am guilty of this as well.

What are your goals / objectives for the day, week, month and year? Write them down, somewhere. Anywhere. Make that place the simplest place to access you can think of to achieve consistency in visiting your goals.

Once your goals are set, evaluate and assess your performance. Did you achieve your goal for the day, week or month? You can only know if you assess your progress. This means a short day end check and weekly and monthly checks….. it only takes a few minutes. Designate a consistent time slot for your reviews, this will help build the habit of reviewing.

If you don’t set a standard of performance or measure of performance, you will find yourself producing and achieving less…. you can’t hold yourself responsible for under performing if you aren’t aware that you aren’t where you should be! Many times we think we are performing at a higher level than we really are.

Most importantly, don’t be too hard on yourself if you are not progressing as fast as you would like. This is why it is important that your goals are realistic. The real goal here is to achieve an overall consistency in evaluating your progress…. not pushing yourself into depression because you didn’t nail your target goals. Not achieiving set goals is merely an opportunity to learn and evaluate so that you do achieve those  goals in the future.

When you are done, click here.

Redfin suffered about the worst occurrence a datacenter can endure, fire. They still beat Realtor.com by 12 hours with only 5 hours of downtime compared to Realtor.com’s 17 hours of downtime or 53 hours of downtime if you include the 36 hours of in-action before going offline for 17 hours after  their blog was hacked. In fact, the once daily posts on the Realtor.com blog have ceased altogether for over  two weeks, so it is apparent that the problem is  not under control, unless giving hard working / blogging Realtors less exposure is part of an unannounced strategy.

That’s right, their datacenter caught fire and they still smoked Realtor.com, pun intended. There is only one right way to handle such a situation: quickly, honestly and transparently. If Redfin gets this, why can’t Realtor.com?

Chris Neitzert Sorts Through Charred Rubble of Redfin Datacenter

There was a fire in the Seattle-based data center that Redfin uses to host our web servers, causing a loss of service between approximately 5 a.m. and 10 a.m. Pacific Time. The entire data center was shut down by the fire department, including universal power supplies. Thanks to Redfin’s Chris Neitzert and his team, the site is now up and running. Throughout the interruption, our agents have of course stayed at their posts working with clients. But as the data center installs new equipment, it is possible that we will experience much-briefer interruptions in our website service around midnight tonight. We will continue to be available by telephone at 877-973-3346 or through the direct number our clients have for their agents.
For now, we apologize for the interruption in our service.

Aftermath of Realtor.com Blog Hack

Introducing the LeadPress RSS Real Estate Icon Collection!

DOWNLOAD FREE Real Estate RSS Icons

Some other FREE Tools:

FREE Mortgage Broker Tools

LeadPress builds mortgage marketing websites and helps loan officers generate exclusive mortgage leads.

BrokerScience is not affiliated, related or endorsed in any way, shape or form to or by the National Association of Realtors (NAR).

You can find the National Association of Realtors at Realtor.org.

If you are interested in Real Estate and Mortgage news, you’re in the right place, take a look around!

Are you a fanatical Title Insurance, Escrow or Appraisal blogger? Do you currently blog and need another avenue of exposure? BrokerScience will soon be launching new Title/Escrow centric and Appraisal Centric blogs and we need bloggers!

BrokerScience network blogs (WordPress based) are highly SEO optimized, utilize the latest bleeding edge plugins and can provide an optimal platform for insuring you get the best search engine coverage of your posts. We will obviously maintain the platform rigorously and will build out necessary features you find necessary. That’s right, if you have an idea or format you want us to build out for you, we will do it! Once we obtain a minimal level advertising we will gladly revenue share as well.

If you are interested or know somebody who is, let’s talk!

We’re extremely excited to be taking a few weeks off starting tomorrow….. We are recreating a famed trip from two summers ago where we took our time taking the PCH up from Orange County, making our way through Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Monterey, Big Sur, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Napa Valley, the famed 128 highway (rolling hills, fruit stands, vineyards & apple orchards), Mendocino, Eureka, Arcata & beyond. After a gruelling 18 months non-stop, this is one deserved vacation.

The truth is that we may be gone for two weeks or it may be eight…. I just don’t know at this point. If I feel like working, I will, if not I will be busy sipping coffee at the local coffee shop, hiking in the redwoods, white water rafting, exploring small coastal towns and everything else we can think of that is fun. The truth is that I am addicted to the internet and social media, so I will likely not be too far.

Please Stand By For Further Communication …………

(Disclaimer: This article discusses some concepts that require an advanced knowledge of WordPress, PHP, CSS and other web development strategies. If you are not familiar with these topics, it is unlikely we will be able to help you implement them. If you do have questions, please hit the forums to discuss.)

More and more Realtors are realizing the benefits of creating a new website for each listing they have. The goal in creating a website that is dedicated to a specific listing is to create a powerful online marketing tool, increase search engine exposure, obtain top positions in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and provide an online presence for promoting the listing’s benefits through useful and informative content and beautiful images. We are going to discuss how to build and optimize your single property website and are throwing in a new twist on where your content should be located.

Benefits of Using Single Property Listing Websites:

1. They can be a powerful listing and marketing tool referenced online and offline in marketing materials to help increase listing exposure.
2. They increase listing owners’ confidence in you.
3. They can help you gain more listings and are one more selling point / benefit you can offer when trying to obtain listings or convert FSBO’s.

1) Choosing a Domain Name

The first decision to be made is choosing a domain name. The most common route is simply using the listing address as the domain name, for example, 123MainStreet.com. Many agents cite that they use the listing address as the domain because it provides a keyword rich URL which can be beneficial for SEO / ranking purposes. The truth is that having a keyword rich domain name for SEO purposes alone is becoming less and less important as time goes on (some would argue it is a non factor already), is only one SEO factor among many and as we will explain, there are more compelling reasons to use non-address based domain names.

Make It Easy to Remember. The primary reason you may not want to use the address as the domain name is marketability. Buyers are much more likely to remember “TatumRanchHome.com” as opposed to “1934ViaLindaWay.com”. This holds true whether they are glancing through a magazine and see your ad, are trying to remember the domain name from a flyer they have thrown away, or even more importantly, if they are trying to remember your domain name for the listing sign they happened to glance at as they drove by the listing.

Usability Trumps SEO. The bottom line is that you may not want to sacrifice the overall marketability and utility that an easy to remember domain name provides (this is true of any domain name in any vertical) for SEO purposes (keyword rich URL).

Jay Thompson also points out another strategy for choosing domain names, using generic or neighborhood / community based names such as “TatumEstates.com” or “IrvineEsplanade.com”. He points out that these names can be recycled over and over which can save the time and money invovled with registering a new address based domain for each new listing.

Read The Full Story »

1) Learn the ePerks Basics with the Seminal Piece on ePerks:

ePerks.com: A Case Study in Greed and Self-Imposed Brand Destruction

2) Read the Blog Post / Comments That Started It All:

ePerks- A Scam or A Gem?

3) Read the Cease & Desist Letter, Threats and Lawsuit from ePerks CEO Ben Behrouzi:

Cease & Desist Letter: Chilling Effect: How A Behemoth Company Can Silence A Blogger

Read: BrokerScience Commentary on Suit

4) Read Vlad’s Response to Being Falsely Accused of Child Molestation:

How Far Do You Go To Silence A Blogger And When Does It Become Too Far? (Post deleted per Vlad’s Settlement)

5) Listen to the Shocking Ben Behrouzi Voice Mails:

ePerks CEO Ben Behrouzi Voicemails Exposed: Threatens to Blackball and Sue Employee

6) Learn about the ePerks Link to Vlad Zablotzkyy:

ePerks IP Address Link to Vlad Zablotzkyy: When the Hunter Becomes the Prey

7) Read about Behrouzi’s Threats Against BrokerScience

Ben Behrouzi Insinuates Legal Action Against BrokerScience, Cites “Damages” and his confirmation to take action against BrokerScience on Inman. Read BrokerScience commentary on Inman piece.

ePerks: A Case Study in Brand Destruction:

(These are the “minions” ePerk’s Attorney infamously referred to in the Inman Article.)

ePerks v Vlad: Strategies to Avoid a Viral World War

ePerks – I Am Not A Minion Mr Cook

Im Mad As Hell-You Will Be Too When You Read About Vlad Zablotskyy and ePerks

ePerks & Freedom of Speech?

An Open Letter to Ben Behrouzi

Real Estate Radio USA Interviews Mary McKnight

Vlad Zablotskyy V. ePerks The Cliffs Notes Version

Vlad Zablotskyy – A Martyr for Reputation Management

Do I look Fat in This Lawsuit?

Nominee for PR Blunder of the Year – ePerks

5 Ways to Support Vlad Zablotzkyy

Suport Vlad Zablotskyy in his defense against ePerks.com frivolous suit

Some companies are stupid, and eperks may be the stupidest

ePerks: A brand going down in flames

ePerks vs Blogger Vlad Zablotskyy, Freedom of Speech in Cyberspace at Stake

Suport Vlad Zablotskyy in his defense against ePerks.com frivolous suit

ePerks Sues Real Estate Blogger

Ben Behrouzi’s Fair Darts

Blogger Is Sued for Business Disparagement

Write a post supporting your fellow real estate blogger, Vlad Zablotskyy, in his battle with ePerks and I will give you a blog

ePerks Sues Real Estate Blogger, Blogosphere Unites to Destroy the ePerks Brand

RSS Pieces provides a rundown of how ePerks is destroying its own reputation

Want money back at closing?

Is ePerks.com’s Ben Behrouzi, infamous for trying to censor a real estate weblogger, stealing content from Mervyns and Chevron?

Support the Vlad Zablotskyy Legal Defense Fund: A real estate weblogger is being throttled by corporate bully ePerks.com. The free speech rights you will be fighting for are your own…

Memo to ePerks.com: You idiots! Trying to censor a real estate weblogger is a poor way to defend your reputation — such as it is…

ePerks To Sue Blogger – Freedom Of Speech Threatened

Looking for lawyers…

Blogger is Sued for Business Disparagement

Sometimes everybody’s gotta take a side

ePerks: What Were They Thinking?

Blogging and Freedom of Speech

Blogger Get “Cease and Desist” from ePerks

iHype & ePerks – How To Kill A Startup

Memorial Day and the Plight of a Blogger

Open Letter to ePerks.com

ePerks Shafts Realtors

Are ePerks Spammers?

Real estate rebates and referrals with a twist

ePerks & iHype – Legal Kneejerk – Sues Blogger