Blogs can bite back, Realtor discovers

Marketing experts encourage real estate agents to blog. A well-written blog, focused on local issues, they say, helps paint real estate agents as experts.

But a blog can also cause agents trouble. Just ask Lucas Lechuga, an agent with Esslinger-Wooten-Maxwell, a real estate brokerate in Coral Gables, Fla. Lechuga lost his job because of what he wrote on his blog. You can read the story, written by Patrick Danner of the Miami Herald, here.

Lechuga wrote on his blog that at least half of the buyers in a 635-unit condominium tower would default on their mortgage loans. He then wrote that the project’s developer had once declared banruptcy back in the 1980s.

Problem is, the developer never did declare bankruptcy. The developer filed a $25 million defamation lawsuit in Miami-Dade Circuit Court against Lechuga and Esslinger-Wooten-Maxwell. The brokerage firm quickly terminated its relationship with Lechuga.

How will the lawsuit play out? Who knows? The important point here is that agents — anyone, really — who blog have to be mindful of what they put on their sites. We sometimes like to think of the Internet and blog sites as the one place where people can write about whatever is on their mind. But be careful, those words can come back to haunt you.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, mostly because of a recent post I wrote about a couple suing their real estate agent over the price they paid on their home. The post generated a lot of comments. Most of them were extremely insightful. Some, though, crossed the line and couldn’t be printed. Those posts usually were filled with insults about the couple at the center of the story. It’s unfortunate, because the posts often contained good points along with the unneeded vitriole.

I sat on one of the posts for a few days before finally approving it this morning. The post, by a writer named “Tom,” was rude. But it also made several valid points about the lawsuit. After debating, I finally decided that the good points outweighed some of the post’s more troubling comments. In an ideal world, “Tom” would have left out the insults and name-calling, and focused on his valid arguments. But, of course, this is far from an ideal world.

If you have a chance to read Tom’s comment, which you can find here, do so, and let me know what you think.