As some of you may know, Allen and I have been playing around with the idea of buying a new house these past few months. There are a few reasons for this, including practical things like low interest rates, preferable things like a shorter commute for him (he drives 40 miles to work everyday - ugh), and other nice to have things like more space, bigger kitchen, etc etc. However, since we are incredibly under on our house right now like most people are, we are looking into the option of renting our house out instead of selling right away so we don't have to cut a huge check.
All good in theory, until last week. We had posted our house on zillow.com and got a message that someone was interested in setting up a walk-through! So we're all excited, and I call the woman last week hoping to schedule it up. She answers, and proceeds to tell me how she has been hunting around on other sites like Craig's List, and actually had found something in Southfield that she really liked (I know, I was wondering the same thing you probably are - why on earth is she telling me this?!). Well apparently, the guy who was renting out the Southfield house told her that it wasn't for rent anymore, but that he had another house available to rent while he was on a missionary in Africa. The address he gave her? OUR ADDRESS. This guy had apparently seen that our house was for rent on Zillow, or had just randomly picked an address, and it happened to be ours!! He let her know that since he was "out of the country" that she could just go to our house and look in the windows and if she liked the house, he told her that if she sent him a $600 security deposit with the first month's rent of $800 that he would mail her the keys.
*#$*)!&^@%#$)*(&$#)(*@#$&#$)(*!&$]
So this woman was kind enough to forward me all of his emails so we could properly file a consumer fraud report, file a report with Craig's List, and file a police report. Also, I flagged his ad on Craig's List so hopefully no one else gets scammed by this.
But there is a bigger question out there: Who the hell do these people think they are?! I mean really. REALLY?! Sending someone to trespass on another person's property? Scamming people out of money when the economy is hard enough as it is? Those people are the scum of the earth.
Needless to say, I was in a bit of a rage over this. The woman agreed to still come see our house this past weekend (especially now that she knew we weren't in Africa), so we were at least excited about that prospect. Allen and I woke up at 6:30 am Saturday and spent about 6 hours cleaning our house from top to bottom. So we were prepped, ready, and excited for this woman to come over so we could make a smashing impression on her....and she never showed.
Sigh.
We're both trying not to be too disappointed about things, since the house really needed a good cleaning (clearly since it took a long time), and we were still able to get our Christmas tree up and everything. I think that if the woman had at least shown up and decided that she didn't like the house that we would have felt better that we had at least gotten someone to come see it. Hopefully we start to get a few more prospects after the holidays so we can really get to the good stuff - finding the house of our dreams!
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