[Walter_Middie]

A real estate agent stole about $300 worth of coins from my house Wednesday (Feb 18th) afternoon. Our house has been for sale and on the market for about a week. We had an open house on Sunday, and received 2 offers. That’s pretty good in this market, but our house is really nice, and it was priced right. We accepted one of the offers and our sale is pending.

On Wednesday, the house was technically still on the market, as our real estate agent did not have time to change the listing yet. About 12:30, 1:00 pm, my wife came home from running errands, and found a real estate agent in the house. She said he was surprised to see her, looked nervous for some reason, and his hand was shaking when she introduced herself. The real estate agent left, and we didn’t think anymore about it. Last night I noticed that a large glass jar that we keep our spare coins in had the top off of it. Looking closer, I noticed that it was almost empty – it had been almost full of quarters – several hundred dollars worth was missing.

The real estate agent had left his card, but the web site on it didn’t work, the phone number was disconnected, and the business is no longer at the address shown. Our key lock box is a GE IBox Supra, which logs everyone that enters the house. My real estate agent said that whoever entered the house did not update his info, so we don’t know who it was. The picture and the name on the real estate agents card matches a local Keller Williams real estate agent. I wonder if my wife can identify him in person. She can’t tell from the lousy picture on his business card.

The Sherriff was at the house and tried to get finger prints off the glass jar, but they were mostly smudged. The Sherriff was very nice, but also said that the crime lab was probably too busy to worry about this anyway. In the big scheme of things, this isn’t a huge crime, but it burns me up to think this real estate agent is going around to houses for sale and stealing stuff.