what to do if you suspect realestate fraud?
Posted on March 10th, 2010 by admin
I really liked a home i saw on the market it has been on the market for over 8 months i offered more then the asking price they told us that the home is contingent.we were told that the home would be closed on the tenth but we still see the property listed as active on different web sites our realestate agent tried calling them again several times and they won’t answer his phone calls what actions can we take if any to find out whether or not the house was closed on?
yes they did tell us that they would present our offer .
We need much more information to determine what is going on.
What you have experienced is not necessarily fraud.
I cannot imagine a seller or the listing agent of a seller who is trying to sell their property, refusing to acknowledge a serious offer that can close escrow, especially where the offer is over the price that they are asking for the property.
However if the listing agent does not think that you can get financing, the listing agent will not want to take the property off the market and tie it up in escrow if it appears that you will not be able to get financing and be unable to close the escrow.
Also, even though youu said your offer was over the asking price there may have been other offers even higher than yours.
Even though the property had been on the market for eight months, the real estate market was very slow several months ago, but now in the area where I live, large numbers of buyers have recently come out from the shadows and many houses on the market now have multiple offers with offers over the list price.
Also, it is not clear to me what the sale was contingent upon.
By contingent, did you mean that your offer was a back up offer behind another offer that was scheduled to close on the tenth and the contingency was that if that transaction fell through yours would be placed in first position?
Or, if yours was a back up offer were there a number of back up offers? If so was your offer behind another back up offer?
Or did you mean that your offer was in first position to close on the tenth, but did not close?
Were you able to get financing? If not your offer would not have been accepted even if it was over the asking price.
In that case the property would still be on the market because the seller’s agent does not think that you can get financing and does not want to tie up the property in escrow if the listing agent for the seller thinks that you will not be able to close escrow because you will not be able to get financing.
Also where did you see the property advertised for sale?
You note that it was on a number of web sites. Many of the internet Web sites do not remove the property after it has been sold.
Part of the reason for this is that the moderators do not clean up the information of the site and the seller’s agent does not take tihe time to report the sale to all of the sites that they advertised the house on. There are many internet Web sites that advertise real estate. The listing agent may have the property advertised on 10 or more internet Web sites.
In many cases the agents have forgotten which sites they had the house advertised on and forget to notify the site when the house is sold.
I have found houses advertised for sale on the internet long after they had been sold because the listing agents forgot to notify the Web site that the house had been sold and to remove it from the site.
To find out whether the property was closed, the most reliable source is to visit The County Recorder’s Office in the County where the property is located.
Look up the property in what is known as the grantor/grantee index. The grantor is the seller and the grantee is the buyer.
There usually is an index that you can use to look up the name of the seller of the property in that index, if you have the correct address of the property.
Then look up the name of the seller in the grantor/grantee index to see if the seller has transferred the property.
If the seller has transferred the property you will find the record of the grant deed that the seller signed over to the buyer.
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