Real Estate Agent Explains How He Almost Fell for a Vacant Land Scam

This as-told-to essay is based on conversations with Adam Pretorius, who’s been a real estate agent in Iowa since 2009. Pretorius was targeted as part of a vacant land scam in which scammers impersonate property owners and solicit agents to fraudulently sell their land. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I’ve been practicing real estate since 2009. I focus just on residential, and as a top performer in town, maybe I got complacent.

I’d heard of scammers being out there, but not specifically on land or listings. Maybe it was my own complacent belief that it wasn’t going to happen to me because I’m smarter than my colleagues.

That kind of naivety is what gets you into these situations. These scammers are very smart, very clever, and very disciplined, and they have a pattern that they use again and again.

Land is a very easy scam because there are some different safeguards: You don’t need access to a property — it’s just a raw parcel. It’s not the same value, per se, as a home, but it doesn’t have the transferring of utilities and other little things that would get caught in the way of a transfer.

And apparently, in me looking into this more and talking to more colleagues, I learned scammers actually do have success with it from time to time.

Until this happened to me, I was not aware it was a major issue. After it occurred, I realized how common this actually is — which made me feel a little bit better after feeling so sheepish about the situation, which didn’t just cost me time, but a lot of money.

I’m not the first agent to fall for this scam, and I won’t be the last

Land is our biggest shortage and issue, even in the Midwest, particularly Iowa. Farmers just aren’t selling farms, and when they do, there’s a lot of red tape in getting land developed. Finding raw land or developable land is a rarity.

We do a lot of infills out here. An infill lot is a lot that is in an established neighborhood that, for one reason or the other, wasn’t built on — whether it was an existing lot that maybe the neighbor bought to have a little cushion next to them, or it was just never built on, or maybe it was a piece of land that’s been parceled off over time. But the lot itself is not part of a new subdivision.

An infill is going to carry a premium because you have an established neighborhood.

The land of subject was $200,000. So we’re not talking an insignificant figure. Not as much as, say, a single-family home that might average around $400,000 to $500,000, but enough that it would be a significant return for a scammer.

I was contacted by phone and followed up by email and text in early January. Someone who I thought was the prospective seller contacted me, letting me know that they had a lot that they had not built on. They said they’d now moved out of state and weren’t planning to come back because they live in Illinois. It’s just a piece of land that they had attempted to sell before, and that agent was unsuccessful.

They said they canceled with that agent after a couple of months, and they would like to have me interview both on the price and how I might approach it differently to make sure we can get the lot sold this time.

This isn’t uncommon, so to this point, it sounded valid. I did some checking on the MLS, and in fact, it was listed before and was canceled after two months.

I verified, by public records, that the owner does in fact live in Illinois, worked for a medical occupation, and had lived there for some time.

At this point, things were checking out. The email that was used was an Outlook email with the owner’s first and last name, with a few characters.

I do have an extra verification where I am able to look up phone numbers — I did use that in this case, as the number was listed as unlisted and unregistered, but that’s not uncommon for medical professionals. Though it was a small flag, it wasn’t enough that I was seeking the additional verification that I should have, given hindsight.

I did my typical interview process, sent them a market analysis, recommendations on the price, what I charge, how I get paid.

Then we discussed getting the lot ready for the market. I sent the paperwork, they signed it, and I got a couple of additional details that we needed for the file. I spent almost $1,000 in marketing to get it ready, shot it live in the MLS.

Seven hours later, I got an angry phone call from the apparent actual owner who claimed that this is the third time this has happened to him.

These scammers keep coming back to the same lot that he owns, and the last time it was listed, he notified that agent, hence why it was canceled. That one took a couple months. In this case, it took just a day because he realized he’s being targeted again and again.

I shouldn’t have skipped steps when asking for verification

Much to my surprise, many more agents have been contacted for the exact same lot since this incident.

They haven’t sold it, but there have been enough agents who have been duped, and there’s a lot of time and money that’s been lost in the fraud. The main party, much to their relief, has not been affected.

We’re in a very digital age, and the process moves quickly with online signatures, e-platforms, and e-filing.

It’s very easy now to do these things quickly and maybe not ask for the extra verification that we should ask for. We don’t do things face-to-face; that’s not uncommon.

When you can’t get enough verification, you need to ask for them to provide some form of ID, whether that be a driver’s license or a passport, or something that makes you feel more secure about the individual that you’re talking to.

Since the incident, my process changed: I need to get at least three forms of verification. For me to feel very good, one of them should be either a driver’s license or a passport when I have somebody who’s out of town who I’m unable to verify.

My hope, and why I am telling my story, is that if we go to a place where we’re sharing this and we’re reporting it, rather than feeling guilty about it, our collective information will be our strongest weapon, and we can help fight back on this.

It’s human to make mistakes, and it just shows that no level of experience or diligence is going to make any agent or person immune. The vulnerability exists in high-end and vacant land alike.

It’s easy for myself as a top producer to say, “Well, that’s not going to happen to me,” but that’s complacency at its finest. I made a mistake. Hopefully, others will learn from this, too.