A Lesson In How Not To Spam Courtesy Of A Local Condo Developer

Founder of the social networking news site Newsvine and Seattle resident Mike Davidson got an email from Moda Condominiums last week. Not too big a deal, especially considering he'd given their website his email address for the specific purpose of sending him updates on availability. However, the CC field contained the email addresses of all 1086 recipients.

It’s bad enough when a friend forwards you a joke e-mail and there are 50 people CC’d, but this list has some serious value attached to it. 1086 qualified real estate leads looking to purchase a condo in Seattle? What’s that worth? $25 per lead? $100 per lead? $25,000-$100,000? Real estate and mortgage leads are extremely expensive/lucrative and everyone on the exposed list can only hope one out of the 1086 people doesn’t find a buyer. In fact, it’s likely that some people on the list are real estate and mortgage people.

At his blog the conversation quickly turned to the monetary value of 1000 real estate leads (flashback: "Bullshit the thirtieth, I don't get on the board the thirtieth, they're going to can my ass. I need the leads. I need them now. Or I'm gone, and you're going to miss me, John, I swear to you.") and a poll there indicates that a majority would sell the list if they could get $10,000 for it. Commenters indicate that the kind of leads provided in the CC field would be worth around $20 a pop so the list would have a value of around $20,000. Smooth, Moda.

Moda is the developer of the Belltown condos that were in the news here a few weeks back for offering sub-300 sq/ft units. New York-style living and 1996-style spamming! This item is actually a little old so Moda has had time to apologize and smooth everything over, and since they're actually sold out already we're bracing for the next round of closet sized downtown condos to be announced.