Dishonest Delaware Agents Trying House Fishing to Snare Eager Homebuyers—Protect Yourself!

You’re trying to buy your family a new home in Delaware, and you see one that looks promising on an online listing, so you email the agent and set up a showing.

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Taking time off work, arranging for a back-up to pick Junior at daycare, and ordering take out delivery for what promises to be a late meal, you are eager to finally get to what may be your forever home. Unfortunately, you realized that the house you finally arrive at and the listing’s photos have very little in common. Congratulations, you’ve just been house fished! What usually follows is either a high-pressure, “well we’re here now so let’s go ahead and look at it,” or an offer to look at another, typically higher priced, listing nearby. 

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Listing photo enhancement and staging are just part of the typical puffery (allegedly harmless exaggeration) that is baked into the marketing process. However, taking a page from the catfishing scams found on online dating sites, unethical agents are now using AI to add sophistication to the old lipstick-on-a-pig marketing scams. Snaring unaware buyers that could easily waste a lot of time and money navigating through it, settling for less of a house, or worse yet, wind up with a money pit.

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We’re already noticing an uptick in this type of marketing on the eastern shore, and it appears to be catching on regionally. Any agent or realtor that resorts to AI-enhanced listing deception has already proven they don’t really care about ethics. Remember, your new “friend” does not have your best interest in mind. No sales means no commission, and that’s where their only loyalty lies. No matter how hard an agent claims they work, they won’t be paying your mortgage, nor will they be returning phone calls or emails afterwards when things go wrong.

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So, prepare yourself ahead of time by researching your own home inspector.

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The inspection report is your only defense in making sure you aren’t taken advantage of, so don’t delegate the inspector hiring to the agent who only stands to benefit if the closing occurs. This includes letting them make phone calls for you (we recently had a Realtor in Maryland lie and tell the customer that we had no availability for an inspection and only found out later when the customer called expressing disappointment). 

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You provide for your family, act and protect them from this greed gone wild. Hire a master inspector that works for you and you alone—hire Tokori.