Just went through hell at Empire Flippers, I need a beer

tyealia

tyealia

BuSo Pro
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So I just went through the sales process from hell.

Empire flippers completely put me through the wringer I am depressed and demotivated, I need a drink thank god its friday.

I started off finding a website I liked. It had been on the market for about 20 days, I saw some small opportunities nothing insane but enough to see a bit of growth for me to keep it in my portfolio. It was listed at 33x, I talked the buyer down to 28x to mitigate my risk (80% of traffic was to one page and almost all traffic was from featured snippets, without the snippet it was ranked about 5th for those terms) So the risk was pretty high for this site, but I think I could have made it work and built off its decent DR to explore some more key terms.

So I get my offer accepted in an email from the buyer "if you do x, then the site is yours ill sell it to you today" and I build a great rapport with the buyer feel like we could even do some great things together later. The buyer tells the empire flippers team to take the site down and says I am buying the site he wants to sell to me and no other buyer. EF little did I know has a system of a last-minute auction based on the buyer's offer.

So if your offer gets ACCEPTED even if there's an email agreement from the seller saying they promise to sell to you then your payment offer is "circulated" to everyone that had the site set to watching and they get a chance in 24hours to beat your offer, basically, its an auction for 24h based on your agreed-upon purchase price, circulating is a nice way of phrasing so it doesn't sound as grimy. The seller im speaking with then emails them saying "take it out of circulation I sold it". Email gets ignored and it stays in circulation.

This to me is super annoying havent come across this before, not sure how other sites work. But I digress this crap asside the "circulation" period ends and the site is now mine I get ready to send my wire transfer call my bank and poof EF rep tells me to stop everything and call him back.

I call him. Looks like there's an issue, one of their interns or team forgot to move an excel row and I was about to buy the site based on Amazon pre commissions earnings multiple even though it said the P&L statement reflected the changes. Essentially I was about to pay 40% more for the site. This here is something I am PROUD of EF for, all the other crap aside they were honest and transparent and let me know immediately they had accidentally bungled this, kudos to them.

I get on a call with the buyer we discuss and I change my offer to new commission-based and an extra 1x multiple, one extra month. Buyer agrees and says to EF I am selling to this person right here(points at myself) I accept his offer he is sending the wire transfer. So the second time I have a written email of confirmation of my offer "I accept X's offer"

Once again I call my bank to get everything together with my wire transfer and go to sleep.

Morning comes I wake up 6 am due to the excitement of receiving my new site, EF representative sends me a message saying call me back immediately.

I answer in my boxers with bacon popping on a skillet in the background, "we got a full price offer and decided to sell it to them unless you match."

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

How many times do I need to have my offer accepted, have someone tell EF to take down the listing, tell them their selling to me and then have them walk it back?

Its like confirmed deals only exist as a starting ground for them to play other buyers against each other.

They tell me this new buyer offered full listing price and he's ready to wire and ask if I want to match the full listing price, I say I'm done, I'm tired, I'm burned out, I have already dedicated 2 days to due diligence, to speaking with the buyer, to thinking about this listing, its now become the listing from hell for me I don't feel good about it and ill always be pissed off when I see this site, so I politely said im out. I hang up and sit down on my chair staring out onto the patio my eye slightly twitching.

I miss being able to get a deal together with someone and say ill give you this to buy it now, have them say yes and boom deals over, no behind your back dealing, and using your offer to try and squeeze out more from others. I've had deals like this on flippa, where I told a buyer my offer and he changed the buy it now price and I just purchased it.

Now as long as EF has good listings ill still try to buy from them since forced bidding wars in brokerage deals is a very small deterrent to me purchasing something with high value, but god damn was this the most frustrating attempted purchase of my life.

I'm burned out, this is my rant, thank you. If your an EF employee please don't ban my account <3 Noone reads the water cooler section anyway. <3
 
Call the banners, we’ll storm their gates!
 
Very sorry to hear that. It's a very messy experience that most buyers go through (myself included).

It's in their best interest (EF, FEI, any other broker) to get the max price because that's when they make money (15-20% is obnoxiously wrong). They completely invalidate the concept of getting a good deal by doing solid business (negotiation, leverage) and that sucks.
 
Having just lost a house to a similar process it sucks and I feel your pain.

However - nothing is sold until it is sold and as much as this process seems unfair as a seller it works in my interest and I have no issues with it.

Take the emotion out of it. It is business.
 
I was turned off from Empire Flippers when they wanted a $297 fee to run a full valuation on my site. Even if I listed with them, the fee wouldn't have been deducted from the brokerage fee paid on sale completion. I'm sure they get a lot of tire kickers, but come on...
 
MrMedia said:
Having just lost a house to a similar process it sucks and I feel your pain.

However - nothing is sold until it is sold and as much as this process seems unfair as a seller it works in my interest and I have no issues with it.

Take the emotion out of it. It is business.
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Yeah, this is actually word for word what the EF rep told me including the housing example. I am fine with all of that just in my particular situation I guess my question is at what point is a written agreement with a seller binding? Like I had written email confirmation direct from the seller I had won the listing seller had chosen to sell to me directly and to wire twice with him asking them to take down the listing.

There have been lawsuits on eBay where after an auction ends the seller refuses to sell because he sees he can get more somewhere else, the lawsuits have gone in the buyer's favor so there is precedent.

But yeah nothing to do but move on, maybe ill find something better, or maybe ill just use those funds to grow more of my own properties. :smile:
 
tyealia said:
I am fine with all of that just in my particular situation I guess my question is at what point is a written agreement with a seller binding?
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“Until the money is in my bank account I don’t believe anyone” - Dan Peña​

Anybody can re-neg on a deal period. If the Vatican Church can re-neg on a deal, anyone can.

It all comes down what you are willing to fight for. Having a ton of fancy paperwork doesn’t mean anything if you aren’t willing to fight in court to defend it.

Just like Stannis Baratheon had to press his claim or be forgotten. Fight for what is yours.
 
I sold a site, mid 6 figs recently and the team who put in the bid started to renegotiate with me and come back with 20+ questions after the site had gone out for circulation.

I was like wtf - you have agreed to buy and now you are renegotiating / have questions....

Lucky for me someone came in with full asking price and snapped the site away from them at the last minute.

Saved me a massive headache and added another $60k to my bank account while the other team were like.......... wut.

Like @CCarter says - it comes down to what you are willing to fight for.
 
Yeah was more of a hypothetical question definitely wouldn't pursue this. Learned a great life lesson.
 
MrMedia said:
I sold a site, mid 6 figs recently and the team who put in the bid started to renegotiate with me and come back with 20+ questions after the site had gone out for circulation.
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Would you recommend EF for selling sites in a similiar price range?
 
JamaicanMoose said:
I was turned off from Empire Flippers when they wanted a $297 fee to run a full valuation on my site. Even if I listed with them, the fee wouldn't have been deducted from the brokerage fee paid on sale completion. I'm sure they get a lot of tire kickers, but come on...
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I listed a site with EF once, (well tried to, they seem to not like small ecom sites) and I paid the $297. The stipulation I got was that they'd refund me if they decided not to take my listing - I got refunded.

So...to me this does eliminate the tyre kickers and those who have sites EF isn't interested in dealing with; and at the end of the day I can stomach $297 if I'm getting a $50K sale price.
 
Update: Just wanted to post a quick update here since it seems like everything works out if you wait it out and this ends in a happy ending. Although I didn't get this website I decided to sign up with @andreint at Investor club(not affiliated). I got a pro membership and found a site I liked and bought it the first day, worked out a deal with the owner and the listing was sold and taken down, no bs 1 day auction after the offer was accepted.

Now there was an issue the seller didn't declare his pbns($250 a month worth) in the expenses but he let it slip out during our call so I quickly factored that into the price which was quickly updated by the team. Also when the site was transferred over he didn't declare the 5 paid monthly plugins he had going or really anything else. I see this as a theme a lot of sellers dont really declare anything in regards to expenses usually just the hosting, I cant even verify the pbns he had were 250 a month and not 500 a month so there is a lot of using the honor system here.

I now have the site and after 10 days I was greeted with an amazing bonus. The sites top 3 keywords all bounced to #1 in google and earnings tripled.

What about the site I missed out on? Well googles featured snippet updates as of recently have been taking more and more away and that site lost its snippets that were generating 50% of income. So the site dropped half of its traffic. Buying it would have been the worst purchase I ever made.

Suffice to say like Jocko says, when something happens say Good. You can always turn it into a positive in the end
 
tyealia said:
Update: Just wanted to post a quick update here since it seems like everything works out if you wait it out and this ends in a happy ending. Although I didn't get this website I decided to sign up with @andreint at Investor club(not affiliated). I got a pro membership and found a site I liked and bought it the first day, worked out a deal with the owner and the listing was sold and taken down, no bs 1 day auction after the offer was accepted.

Now there was an issue the seller didn't declare his pbns($250 a month worth) in the expenses but he let it slip out during our call so I quickly factored that into the price which was quickly updated by the team. Also when the site was transferred over he didn't declare the 5 paid monthly plugins he had going or really anything else. I see this as a theme a lot of sellers dont really declare anything in regards to expenses usually just the hosting, I cant even verify the pbns he had were 250 a month and not 500 a month so there is a lot of using the honor system here.

I now have the site and after 10 days I was greeted with an amazing bonus. The sites top 3 keywords all bounced to #1 in google and earnings tripled.

What about the site I missed out on? Well googles featured snippet updates as of recently have been taking more and more away and that site lost its snippets that were generating 50% of income. So the site dropped half of its traffic. Buying it would have been the worst purchase I ever made.

Suffice to say like Jocko says, when something happens say Good. You can always turn it into a positive in the end
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Good stuff!

PBNs - Yeah, that sucks. We have 6 PBN checks but there's not much we can do if the PBNs are properly hidden and the seller decides not to disclose the info. He might've forgotten, but who knows.

We give people the benefit of the doubt the first time. If it happens the second time, bye.

Glad you got some value from the marketplace. As you said, the system will automatically mark the listing as sold as soon as your offer gets accepted, so that makes it a fair game.
 
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