Alain Pinel Realtors
Complaint 31264 Details

Que Foor of Alain Pinel Realtors was one of the two listing agents of the home we purchased and she also represented us as our buying agent. When Que became our agent, Greg Celotti, the other listing agent, represented the sellers during the negotiations. Our offer was accepted by the sellers and we became in contract.

One week later, the appraisal report came back showing that the house was 374 square feet smaller than the original listing. We were a bit unnerved, but Que said that it wasn’t a big deal and that these appraisals may not be totally accurate. However, we wanted to get to the bottom of this, so we requested that another independent measurement be done. We hired an architect that gave us more detailed measurements, and found that the house was 624 square feet smaller than what was advertised by Que in the original listing. That’s as if two whole bedrooms just mysteriously vanished. Que tried to sweep it under the rug by saying that that’s what the county records show, and that the house is still a good deal. But how could we be ok with this if the house was almost 20% smaller than what was advertised? We felt like we seriously overpaid for the house, but she wouldn’t do anything about it. Agents are supposed fight for their clients, and this was the kind of thing that separates the good agents from the bad ones, but she just made excuse after excuse. We suspected that since she was also the listing agent (and she was probably taking a double commission for this deal), she didn’t want to acknowledge her mistake. We decided to try to re-negotiate the price with the sellers despite Que telling us to leave things well enough alone.

Since Que wouldn’t help us in trying to negotiate, we had to write letters to the sellers ourselves. And we eventually hired a lawyer to deal the negotiations. In the middle of negotiations, the sellers suddenly sent us a letter asking to confirm that we were buying the house at full price and suspiciously knew the details about our loan status. We were utterly confused because we were still trying to negotiate a lower price. We then found out from our mortgage broker that Que had leaked knowledge of our intent to buy the house even if we couldn’t re-negotiate to a lower price. Basically, Que gave away our poker hand to the sellers. When we confronted her about this, she denied multiple times that she was the person who leaked the info to the sellers.

Frustrated and angry, we wrote a negative review of her on Yelp describing what happened to us. One day later, the Yelp review was filtered out and Que’s husband (a lawyer) sent us a cease and desist letter threatening to sue for defamation. In the letter, Que admitted that she “spoke” to the sellers about our intentions, and tried to justify it by saying that it was just part of the escrow process, which means she has been lying to our face. Regardless, Que never asked our permission to inform the sellers of our intentions, she violated her fiduciary duty to us, and took away all of our bargaining power. We already paid thousands of dollars for our lawyer fees and we couldn’t even negotiate.

Our lawyer told us that we had nothing to be afraid of since everything we posted in the review was true, so we decided to leave the post on Yelp. The next day, another Yelper contacted us and told us that he, too, had had a horrible experience with Que and received a threatening letter from Que’s husband after he posted a negative review. Clearly, this is how she maintains such great reviews on Yelp. She just has her husband intimidate anyone who gives her negative reviews. To this day, Que has not apologized to us or even acknowledged the fact that she lied to us.