One of the hazards of working from a home office is receiving telephone marketing.

For instance, Jacob Krause from ReMax called today to tell me all about the hot real estate market in my (nameless) area. Except, he didn’t. I mean he didn’t call and he didn’t tell me anything. When I picked up the phone a recording of his voice played from an automatic phone dialler. Oh my this is crap, I thought to myself, except I probably didn’t think ‘crap’ and I probably didn’t put things so politely or succinctly.

But Jacob’s call piqued my curiosity. I did a Google search for ‘jacob remax vancouver’ and up came his website (link removed at Mr. Krause’s request) as the first and second listing. I had a quick look at the site and recognized the mode he was operating in. This was an extremely over-optimized website, a website built for discovery and indexing in search engines, a website built only secondarily for humans. From the domain name (vancouver-realestate-condo-and-home.com) to the, ahem, blog, the site is designed to game search engines, to trick them into listing the site highly for specific key search terms.

So? Who cares.

Well, I care. As someone who tries to help clients understand how they should conduct their web marketing, I care. This is the type of website that gives web marketing a bad reputation. The tactics employed by Jacob and/or his web marketeer are dishonest. They also make it harder for legitimate websites to compete. My two touchpoints with Jacob – the recorded voice message and his spammy website – both left me with a greasy taste in my mouth.

Competing against over-optimized websites is kind of like playing a professional sport where some of the athletes use steriods. They have a short-term positive impact by boosting their users’ performance. But overall, beyond the short-term boost, they hurt everyone. The users rationalize their use by saying things like ‘everyone else is doing it’ or ‘who can argue with the results.’ But people lose faith in the system, people can see through the dishonesty.

So, if you’re looking for a real estate agent to buy or sell a home in Vancouver, I advise against using Jacob Krause. I’m actively trying to discourage his marketing tactics. His use of them tells me that he does not respect people and he will do whatever it takes to achieve questionable results. Is that who you want to trust, advising you on your single largest investment?

It’s also likely, and here I’m just guessing, that since the real estate business is largely driven through word-of-mouth referrals, Jacob has to resort to grey-zone tactics (telemarketing spam, search engine spam) because he can’t generate business through word-of-mouth. But there I’m just speculating. Any real-world experiences out there say otherwise?