This review is for Chris and his associate Paula at Artur Realty (http://www.arturre.com). His website would be pretty impressive for a realtor you don't know, but please make your judgement until you read what happened to us.
To simply put, he would do everything for $35! We made an offer to one of his listings on 03/03, and he agreed the offer and returned the signed contract back to on 03/08, which included 3 changed dates on the original contract:
1) Deposit within 15 days (changed to 3 days) of execution of date of this agreement.
2) Settlement date is May 10th (changed to April 10th).
3) Written acceptance will be on or before May 3, 2013 (changed to May 8).
The 3 original dates were crossed out on the original contract, and the new dates were put on top of those. He sent back the modified contract to get our initials for the modifications. Without our acceptance of the modified contract, he cashed our deposit ($1000) on that same Friday (03/08). Please remember this was not an executable contract on that date, and as a realtor for many years he is well aware of the rules and should have not done that.
Once we got the modified contract over the weekend, we decided we could not accept his modifications and decide to cancel the offer, and at the same time asked him to return our initial deposit back. The following are a series of his response:
1) On 03/11: You will forfeit your deposit.
2) On 03/13: We sent the check to you yesterday. This is after we questioned him that it was not an executable contract since none of the changes were initialed and dated. He only informed us this without going through our realtor.
3) We asked him again on 03/20 since we never received any check, and Paula responded on 03/25 and stated "Since we will have to stop payment on the lost check, there will be a $75.00 charge for this transaction." Of course they did not have any prove (original check copy, post office tracking, etc) that they mailed a check to us.
4) Later on 03/25, the charge changed from $75 to $50 according to Chris.
5) On 03/26, the charge changed again from $50 to $35 according to the bank.
6) We agreed to pay the charge in order to settle this fast, if they can prove the bank actually charged $35 to this stop payment. So they sent us 2 pieces of evidence on 03/28: a) a copy of Citizen Bank's brochure showing standard charges; b) A stop payment request to the bank. These do not prove that the actual stop payment has occured. So we further asked if they can "provide a statement record where this $35 has actually been deducted from your account, or a bank written statement showing the actual charge that associated with this transaction." Of course no further response from Artur Realty.
This is getting rediculous for $35. Did they actually send out a refund check earlier? Has the stop payment actually occured? I suspect No to both questions. Would this be good to their reputation? Probably not. Do they care? Not so much as it's only $35, right?
As of now they are still holding our original deposit of $1000, as they only agreed to give back $965. I figure I would write this review for the following reasons: a) $35; b) Share our experience with people who could be their future clients, and who might have second thoughts after reading this. read more