Alain Pinel Realtors

If you’re considering using Alain Pinel Realtors to represent you in a real estate transaction, run the other way as fast as you can. The transaction we recently concluded has to be one of the worst examples of “work” on record. The only thing that happened with regularity was automated computer updates — most of which, by the way, were not in the neighborhood — which hardly qualifies as "work."

Don’t even try to negotiate the commission with these people. They will not budge from the standard six percent, even in a hot, high-priced, multiple-offers-over-asking market. They are clearly interested only in doing as little work as possible for as much money as possible. 

Unlike many realty companies, Alain Pinel Realtors does not offer its clients a staging service. If your property would benefit from being staged, you, as the seller, are expected to make all the arrangements for it and pay for it. This company doesn't even offer to split the cost (which would be a business expense/deduction).

The referrals this company has for cleaning crews, inspectors, gardeners, etc., are at least fifty percent higher than other companies; some were more than 100 percent higher for the same job when compared with other vendors.

Instead of focusing on the attributes of our property, we were frequently told how much it needed to be updated/improved. It began to appear that the property, which was being sold "as-is," had few or no attributes at all.

We were told that open houses were being held on a regular basis; they were not. There was one week in which an open house was to be held on five consecutive days. On each of those days, going by the property at around 2:00pm (including a Saturday) showed no evidence of anything happening — no signs, no cars, no potential buyers…and no real estate agent(s).

The listing agent, Adriana Trenev, seldom performed the duties for this transaction. Instead, they were “handled” by other agents who, as mentioned above, sometimes didn’t show up.

At our first meeting, she promised we’d get top dollar for our property. Instead, when there were viable offers, we were discouraged (by a substitute agent) from making a counteroffer . It was “strongly recommended” we accept an offer that was far below the asking price and not counter, because the substitute agent feared a counteroffer would result in the potential buyer's offer being withdrawn. (Oh, did I mention that Adriana had gone away on vacation?)

She also suggested we take the house off the market—when the listing was less than a week old.

Do yourself a big favor and take your business elsewhere. You’re sure to find a company that takes pride in its work — and agents who will work hard for you.

All I can say is find someone else. They offer to help you with finding an inspector or whatever to do work and charge you twice as much as anyone else. I would like to give an example : fire place repair $3300.00 dollars was the estimate from their people and when I did my own research you can get the whole fire place for $1700.00.

When you go to their web site or yelp you will find reviews and I would bet anything that their own employees put in positive reviews. I personally have nothing good to say except " never sign anything they give you ". Then when you get the inspectors report it is all jumbled up and very confusing, very unprofessional.

The worst part is it's not even close to being over.

DO YOUR SELF A FAVOR AND FIND SOMEONE ELSE........YOU WILL SAVE MONEY AND BE HAPPY.

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 negociations. 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 horriable 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.