Agents Beware - Inquiry Scams Are On The Rise

If you are a real estate agent, you probably jog through a pile of inquiries every day, whether they come from your site, Realtor.com, or any other web portal where your properties are listed. But let's face it, between the thousand e-mails and 10 thousand phone calls, do you really have time to read into each one to see if it's a scam? Probably not.

The truth is, you should.

As per the design of online inquiries, you will likely have to respond to the prospect via e-mail, since phone numbers are rarely provided (this is where scammers get you). Whether it's by sending the prospect your e-mail or simply replying (sometimes even texting the number provided, because they "don't accept calls") will trigger spam mail to be sent to your account or spam texts to your phone... and you wonder where all this junk mail and random ads come from. In worst cases, though rarely, identity theft may be a consequence.

Though summer is winding down, the slow summer market is also a period of highest scam activity, as agents are eager to grab onto any and every lead they find to keep business flowing.

Scam mail is very often computer-generated, and made up of similar discernible components, some are obvious, some - not so much. Here are a few things to look out for...

• Gibberish e-mail address (i.e. gdo345019@gmail.com). In the case of Realtor.com the client provides the name, email and phone number. Very rarely is the e-mail like the one above legitimate. It is important not to confuse this with temporary reply-to addresses automatically generated by websites like Trulia.
• E-mails asking you to conduct urgent long-distance business. Though it's common for high-profile clients to choose to look for properties overseas, saying they will send you first month's rent if you provide your name and address may be reason to suspect a scam.
• Poor or lack of punctuation/grammar. A paragraph containing several sentences separated by commas, or no sentence separation whatsoever may be a sign of a computer generated inquiry from pre-built phrases.
• Names provided will often start with the same letter - usually true if you received a series of inquiries (i.e. James Bliss, John Booth, Justin Benning), since it's likely that a computer generates these by going through letters of the alphabet. 
• Inquiries that ask you to reply to a certain email or "sign in" in order to view photos of similar properties the client is interested in or for whatever other reason.
• First-time e-mails suggesting urgency or asking for immediate action like writing up an offer - let's face it, how many clients do you know that have placed an offer on a condo before seeing it in person.
• Series of inquiries with similar sentences and sentence structure. 
• Series of inquiries about properties over a broad price range. For instance, 5-10 properties ranging from $300,000 - $2,00,000.

Now you have familiarized yourself with a few characteristics of scam inquiries. 

Remember, you should always consider all of these aspects of a scam e-mail concurrently and at your own discretion, since an instance where any one is true may not necessarily mean the inquiry is a scam. 

Cheers.