Prestige, Premium, Top & Luxury Real Estate Awards
Every year, since 1980, we receive in our agency a series of letters or emails offering us various awards that always include terms such as PRESTIGE, PREMIUM, TOP, EXCELLENCE or LUXURY.
These are awards offered by supposedly prestigious magazines, companies or organisations. They usually ask us to send them some data and photos or images of our company. We never do.
Despite the fact that we have never sent our details or asked to be selected, a few days or weeks later we receive an email announcing that our agency ALTEAINVEST HAS WON AN AWARD that distinguishes us as ‘The Best Real Estate Agency in Costa Blanca’, ‘Top 10 Property Brokers in Spain’, ‘Best Luxury Real Estate Company 2023’ or some other award that invariably includes more or less bombastic words such as Luxury, Premium, Prestige, Exclusive or similar.
At first we were surprised by such a flood of awards, not because we didn't think we deserved them, but because we never submitted our application or details to enter such competitions. Simply the kind of companies that hand out such pompous prizes got our details from professional directories or from our website.
Obviously, such prizes are not cash prizes, nor do they give you a holiday in the Caribbean or a Rolex, but only consist of including your company details in a list published in a magazine or on a website.
Any professional or company that is interested or sends their details to this type of prize-giving company, or sometimes even without sending them, as in our case, will receive a message informing them that they have won a ‘Prestige Award’ or similar.
These companies usually distribute awards in different economic sectors (construction, perfumery, dentists, restaurants, etc.) and in several countries and they usually distribute them in several categories (best marketing, best website, best office, etc.). Examples:
- PRESTIGE AWARDS
- LUXURY LIFESTYLE AWARDS
- PRESTIGE BUSINESS AWARDS
- CORPORATE LIVE WIRE PRESTIGE AWARDS
There are also some award distribution companies that ‘specialise’ in one or more sectors. A simple GOOGLE search is enough to discover that there is a long list of such companies ‘specialising’ in REAL ESTATE. For example:
- INTERNATIONAL PROPERTY AWARDS
- WORLD REAL ESTATE EXCELLENCE AWARDS
The business of these award distribution companies consists of publishing in a magazine or on a website the name of several hundred or thousands of companies as winners of a prize or award and trying to get paid by some of them for publishing a more or less extensive report that the same company ‘winner’ of the prize or award can write, or for the delivery of a certificate or ‘diploma’, a trophy, a metal statuette with their name on it or a methacrylate plaque for them to display in their business to ‘prove’ to their unwary customers that they are the ‘best’ or the ‘winner’ of whatever it is.
It is not uncommon to see several dozen or even several hundred companies in the same sector and in the same geographical area win the same prize or award even in the same category.
Is this a SCAM? From a strictly legal point of view, NO, because normally these companies that distribute this type of awards inform you from almost the very first moment of the price list of what their services or products cost, be it the publication of a report of your company in their magazine or on their website, be the price of their ‘diplomas’, trophies or plaques with your name and the inscription of the award you won.
BUT.... it is a deception to your company and your customers because almost all of these award companies are lying because no jury has evaluated the awarded companies in a minimally rigorous way (in reality they do not evaluate anything ....) and, frequently, there are dozens or hundreds of companies like yours that win the same or similar awards as yours.
However, it seems that many companies (not only in the real estate sector) are happy to pay for these ‘diplomas’, trophies or plaques, even though they are aware of the deception because they believe that these shoddy awards improve their reputation or give them prestige or more credibility with their potential clients. And that probably ‘works’ in certain sectors or when dealing with clients with little training or experience or who are naïve.
Fortunately, our company never fell for the deception or tried to deceive anyone and therefore never applied for inclusion in the lists of this type of ‘fake’ awards. If our agency's name appears on any list, it will be because someone included it without our knowledge or authorisation of any kind. We would be ashamed if our clients felt so grossly misled or thought that we took them for fools or ignorant, so if you see our name published in any such list, please let us know so that we can take the appropriate steps to remove it.
