Here’s an interesting post that I found on Facebook, thanks to a great Real Estate Broker named Brooks Findlay in Regina, SK for posting it to Facebook.

Here’s the article…

You have to give Toronto real estate agent Wafa Masri full credit for her honesty.

It’s not everyday you see somebody in the real estate community admit their mistake. I’m not talking about a prediction the Re/Max Hallmark Realty Ltd. agent made about house prices. She might be making the smartest call of her life, taking some time off from the real estate market after 28 years to travel, now that it appears sales and prices have peaked.

No, Ms. Masri’s bad decision came about two weeks ago, after she sold her house and hired a company to move her things into a friend’s place and also into storage.

“I found them on Craigslist,” says Ms. Masri about the movers. Nothing wrong with looking online for a deal, as long as you check out whom you are dealing with before handing over your personal property. She didn’t — and only a phone call to police managed to get her belongings back.

“I don’t move a lot, but I move a lot of people, that’s the crazy thing. You’d think I would know,” Ms. Masri says. “But if my story can help someone, I’m willing to tell it.”

She waited until the last minute to hire a mover, so most of the good ones were already booked. If waiting until the last minute becomes a crime, I’ll be doing five to 10 years in a small cell.

“They sounded OK on the phone and really reasonable next to everybody else,” says the agent, making the sound of alarm bells to demonstrate the warning sign she should have spotted. “I was trying to save money, I’m a cheap person.” Who isn’t?

Her next bad move was no contract. She didn’t agree on a price before she hired them. “The moment they showed up they held me for ransom and then they said they needed cash,” Ms. Masri says.

I hate cash transactions. You can tell me all about the underground economy and paying no taxes — I won’t talk about the moral issue of doing that — but when you pay cash there is no paper trail. No one to sue.

She took out the money from the bank and figured $1,000 would be enough. “Then they started in with talk if there’s stairs, it will be more,” says Ms. Masri. At that point, she called the owner she had first contacted on Craigslist, but he was abusive.

In the end, she paid $1,600. Some of her stuff was shipped to a storage company provided by the movers. The problem is, when she tried to contact the company about where her stuff had been moved, they couldn’t tell her the location.

“I figured they’d stolen my stuff. I called the storage people and they didn’t knew where my stuff was,” she says, adding only a call to police, who had had previous contact with the movers in question, resulted in the retrieval of her things.

“I think the moral of the story is what ever you use, get it from somebody reputable,” says Ms. Masri, adding she’s now wary of transactions through an online source.

I’m not scared of transactions through the Internet, but they should be conducted with caution. In her case, she admits she could have easily demanded references from the moving company. As an agent, if someone asked her for customer references, she’d have no problem with it.

Calgary Police Service Constable Kathy Macdonald, who is charge of cyber awareness for the crime prevention unit, says there’s nothing to stop you from using the Internet to your advantage when researching a company.

“Learn as much as you can beforehand. Ask tons of questions. You can do your own investigation. That’s the beauty of the Internet. You can Google phone numbers, names, addresses, and see if anything comes up,” Const. Macdonald says.

A quick search of the moving company the real estate agent used served up plenty of complaints from unsatisfied customers. In hindsight, Ms. Masri should have done that.

And thanks to her sharing her story, maybe a few people will do just that before hiring a mover.

Financial Post

gmarr@nationalpost.com