Wow, close call.
I did some house sitting this weekend. Well, house listing sitting. A fellow agent is off in the mountains for Mother's Day weekend and asked me to field listing appointments for her while she was out of cell coverage.
No problem!
This agent was working on a listing out of our local MLS and didn't own a local lockbox, so she had a combo lock on it with instructions to contact her for the code. My instructions were to ask for a name, brokerage and license number....then to give out the code.
I got a text from an "agent" asking for the combo. I asked for the information, and over an hour later, I got a name, brokerage and a license number. I always check license numbers is the Department of Real Estate....this one didn't check out. It was the license number of the local brokerage, not the agent himself.
That seemed odd to me. I couldn't see any reason why an agent would "mistake" his own number.
So I called the agent off his website, and sure enough....it wasn't the agent who contacted me. I called the police and gave them the cell number of the fake agent to look into.
I just got a call back and turns out, the fake agent had arranged some other "showings" and stolen items from those homes. The cell was a burner and they didn't have much information to use to catch him. 3 other listings in the general area had lost jewelry, electronics and other valuables.
Whoa!!
Of course we should use the proper lockboxes whenever possible, but occasionally we just can't. In that case, we need to remember that we do have the ability to check information before handing out the combo code, we need to take great care of our clients' homes.
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