First American Real Estate Solutions (FARES) is reportedly the nation’s largest source of real estate data and real estate leads.

I was looking to purchase leads for my investing project and was recommended to FARES.

I later contacted them and purchased 1,000 real estate leads of people who had sold their homes and financed the mortgage for the new buyer. I paid FARES $300 for the leads.

A company account representative walked me through how to use their real estate lead system which allowed for changing dates and downloading as many of the 1,000 leads as I wanted at one time .

Initially I was a happy camper and went about downloading information and mailing out letters and postcards to the lists I had obtained (a 6 month process that ended up costing a lot of money and time)

The number of returned letters from the real estate leads I sent out was small but the odd thing was I never received not one phone call. I had been told by my mentor who had used the list some years earlier, that the average response rate from this particular company’s list was 6%.

I called my mentor for advice, fax her a copy of my mailing piece for review.

Shortly thereafter, I contacted my account rep at FARES and advised him that I had not gotten any response to the real estate lead list I had purchased and wanted to have the information I downloaded verified for accuracy.

I was immediately transferred to the “data verification” department, placed on hold for about 5 minutes and was then told that the list information I had purchased was correct.

I still could not understand why I had not received one phone inquiry from close to 1,000 real estate leads.

So, I decided to take 100 of the names from the list and check the information for myself against the records at our county recorder’s office.

I was shocked to find that only two leads out of 100 of the real estate leads were correct! The other 98 were bogus!

I immediately contacted the account representative to advise him and was disappointed that he did not offer any alternative explanation or better yet, a refund.

I contacted my attorney who sent a letter to FARES advising them that failing to deliver the product paid for was fraud and asked that my money be refunded. I never got a response from this company. When I later spoke with the legal department they said they had no record of the letter.

Although I provided them with proof that the information I received was bogus, they did not refund my money. I actually had a credit balance for leads that I had not used (I had no reason to pull down more useless leads) and they did not refund that money either.

FARES contracts with companies overseas for some of their support. Although these employees tried to be helpful with technical issues I had, it was difficult to communicate due to language barriers.

Based upon my experience with FARES I would definitely not recommend them to anyone who is looking to purchase legitimate real estate leads.