Just two days after News Center 7′s I-Team first reported on a real estate company that is tying up homeowners with 40-year listing agreements, another Miami Valley homeowner is speaking up and saying she’s locked into a questionable, decades-long real estate contract.
Debbie Chasteen, of Carlisle, told the I-Team’s lead investigative reporter, John Bedell, that it all started with a phone call in June.
“We’ll pay you money if you’ll let us list your house,” Chasteen recalled.
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She told the man on the phone that the offer sounded like a scam, but he reassured her that it wasn’t.
“And he said, ‘Oh no, ma’am, it’s not a scam,’” she said.
Chasteen said she ignored her gut, signed the deal and took a check for $485. She said she didn’t fully realize what she’d signed up for until she saw the I-Team’s initial report about MV Realty on Monday.
“I got to checking and I thought, ‘Oh no, that’s the same one I done, too,’ you know,” she told Bedell. “So that’s when I called you.”
For the next four decades, she’ll either have to sell her home with an MV Realty agent or pay a cancellation fee of three percent of her home’s value.
“Here it is, ‘Homeowner Benefit Program,’” she said while showing the I-Team her contract. “Only there’s no benefit.”
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Chasteen, a widow, said she has her affairs in order so that when she dies, her home will transfer to her daughter. As part of the deal, the MV Realty contract will also transfer to her. Now, she’s trying to cancel it.
“I just want to give them their money back and get this 40-year memorandum off my mortgage, off my house,” she said.
The Warren County woman said she’s concerned for her children because the home was for them.
She said if she would have known what she was getting into, she would have never signed the contract. She’s now warning potential homeowners about the company.
“If MV Realty calls you, reaches out to you in any way, shape or form — hang up on them, slam the door in their face,” she said.
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