SPECIAL REPORT: Housing Rental Scams on the Central Coast
It is paradise with a price. People are moving to the Central Coast, shocked at high rental costs, but find a great deal online. When they show up, they realize there is no rental waiting for them.
“If it is too good to be true. It probably is,” Monterey County resident, Katie Dunbar, said.
Dunbar was a few messages from finding this out the hard way. She sent KION emails exchanged between herself and someone she believed was a rental scammer. The emails from someone named “Sarah” asked Dunbar to send the deposit before receiving the keys through the mail. Dunbar told Sarah she was uncomfortable with that. Sarah requested the money, again, and Dunbar stopped the correspondence.
“We’re in Africa, we can’t show the apartment. We are in a foreign country, or we have a family emergency. Or some other excuse for why they can’t show the apartment,” Dunbar said.
You think there is an empty property waiting for you, instead it is you waiting on empty promises.
“We have had people come to us saying ‘I’m here to get the keys or I’m here to sign the lease’ and we don’t know them. We don’t have their application,” Jan Leasure, with Monterey Bay Property Management, said.
Leasure says her company sees this about once a month. Scammers take the company’s rental availability information, but advertise a lower price. “A young couple with a baby and another small child, came in and they expected to be able to pick up a key and move in to a house that they thought they had rented. It turned out not to be a rental at all. They sent money to the fake landlord. And they were here with no place to go. Fortunately we were able to help them.
Stories like this are told all too often.
“I think with the advent of technology, it has become easier for people to perpetrate these sort of scams,” Santa Cruz County District Attorney Jeffrey Rosell, said.
Just this week, a suspected scammer was arrested by Santa Cruz deputies, for allegedly taking thousands in rental dollars for a home he was renting himself. But many other scammers are still out there, and these days there is no telling where.
“They are very good at hiding their positions because they are not even here,” Santa Cruz County Assistant DA, Douglas Allen, said. “The telephone calls go through call centers that go through other places. So we have a difficult time tracking them down.”
Allen says this can be prevented. Aside from knowing who you are renting from, he says you should understand the worth of what you’re getting.
Average one-bedroom rents in Monterey County range upwards of 18-hundred dollars a month. In the city of Santa Cruz, it is more than 2-thousand. This is according to rentcafe.com.
Other tips include checking to see if you can find the property on a real estate or management company’s website. Call them and see if the price and details match up. Also make sure you are speaking with the agent or owner.
