I put on my good jacket, drove over there, and walked in through the front door, right into the middle of it, took a glass of her champagne, and waited for the room full of her admirers to quiet down. Then I spoke, calm and clear.
“Before you list your homes with her,” I said to the room, “you should know what she did with my father’s.”
Because a grieving amateur had done her homework. I hired a real estate attorney, and we pulled the records. The “buyer” she’d pushed me toward was an LLC — and that LLC traced straight back to her. She bought my father’s house cheap through a shell company, then flipped it six weeks later for its real price and kept the difference. That is not fine print. That is a licensed agent stealing from the very person she had sworn to protect.
We took all of it to the state real estate commission. Her license is suspended now, pending revocation. And a judge ordered her to pay back every dollar of that secret profit — with my father’s name on the judgment.
I set the ruling down on her marble kitchen island, right next to the champagne.
She said no one believes a grieving amateur over a licensed professional — she just forgot the amateur can hire professionals of her own.
The who’s-who of the market read it over her shoulder, and one by one, they set down their glasses and left. You could watch her reputation walk right out the door with them. I got my father’s money back, all of it and then some. But that wasn’t even the sweetest part. The sweetest part was every client in that room learning, in the same breath she’d hoped to charm them, exactly who they had been about to trust. Move on, she told me. I did — right through her front door.