A group of realtors from Calgary say they’re out thousands of dollars after doing business with a Kelowna-based video production company.
The realtors say they were promised to appear on a reality TV series, but that the series never materialized.
The company is called Visland. A couple of years ago, it pitched the idea of being on a reality TV series to some realtors in the Calgary area.
Realtor Zach Terlier bought in.
“Visland Media was essentially going to be giving us — agents — an opportunity to be on TV and gain exposure,” Terlier said.
“They were going to supply us with a buyer or a seller that they themselves had cast. And in turn, we would have to give them money to air that episode on TV.”
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Terlier says he gave Visland a $5,000 deposit and waited for Visland to deliver.
“The promise in the contract was that we were going to have something that was going to air on a national broadcast network within 18 months and that hadn’t taken place,” he said.
Realtor Milo Anderson says he, too, gave Visland a $5,000 deposit to be on TV.
He says it didn’t happen, so he confronted Visland CEO Alex Miller in Kelowna and got his money back.
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Anderson also said Miller offered a reason on why the show didn’t take off.
“He said they haven’t been able to find enough buyers who want to go on a TV show,” said Anderson.
“I went, ‘seriously?’ I know a lot of buyers who would love to be on a TV show to buy their house.”
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Realtor Curtis Atkinson is out four times as much as the others after signing up for two shows.
“When it came down to the editing, the final editing, the company basically disappeared,” Atkinson said.
He says he gave Visland more than $21,000.
In response to inquiries from Global News, Visland Media CEO Alex Miller issued a statement, saying they tried but failed to deliver because of “unforseen circumstances.”
Miller says the company takes full responsibility and doesn’t have enough money to provide a full refund to the realtors, but is looking for ways to generate some cash to pay them in full.
And he admits the show was a bad idea to begin with.
“If we had the benefit of hindsight, we would never have attempted to produce this project in the first place, as we are truly sorry about the unfortunate position we have put our clients in,” Miller wrote.
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