If it smells like a rat, well.

The buzz in our office today is the continuing saga of the Charles Rutenberg agent from Tampa that has created a flurry of news and coverage in the recent weeks due to the manner in which her clients were buying homes. The reason our office is buzzing is because this group (agent, investors, and the mortgage broker) all tried to put a deal together with one of our agents here at ERA Lambrecht.

The deal went something like this - the group was interested in putting an offer together to buy one of this agents' listings (in our office), but they wanted to add thousands and thousands of dollars to the purchase price, but they wanted the seller to credit it back at closing.

To make a long story short, we talked about this in our office because nobody really understood how this was going to work and how in the world it could be legit. Well, the deal never got done at our office with this listing agent,but based on the news reports, dozens of deals did get done and all of them are now under suspicion.

It goes back to the things that our parents probably told each of us as we were growing up - if something sounds too good to be true - well, you know, it probably is. How does the saying go - if you smell a rat....

Yikes.