With ethics like that, it sounds like you are better off without her. It is better for employees that can’t be trusted to be someone else’s employees, not yours. I’ve never figured out why someone would hire that way - if the employee burned someone else to come to your firm, you’d have to be constantly watching your back. Short term gains for long term pain.
Hopefully the criminal aspect will help you get somewhere. Can you file complaints with your state licensing agency for yet another means of applying pressure? Think multiple avenues - gives you a better chance of one or more of them being successful. Attorneys in the various realms should be able to provide guidance on where your legal grounds lie. It’s kinda like throwing sparring combinations. You plan on the first move or two being blocked with the follow up moves scoring your points. Sometimes you get lucky and score on the first move. (I own a karate school.)
BTW, have you gone through her computer and company email during her employment with you? If you have regular data backups, you may be able to recover some leads and other data that could be useful in the legal proceedings. If she deleted files, don’t touch the computer - it is sometimes possible to recover deleted data if new files haven’t overwritten the old memory locations. There are computer forensic services that specialize in this.
I recently had an agent leave my rental locating brokerage to work at a competing agency. This agent took with her (and refuses to return) the only copies of all current prospective tenants’ information for the busiest season. This will most likely cost me 10’s of thousands of dollars in lost business. I’ve sent a certified demand letter to return the paperwork. We had no written agreement as to what happens to commissions that were already billed out when she left (nor commissions that have not been billed yet). As broker, is it legal for me to hold her commissions until the matter is resolved? Does the agent have a legal claim to this money at all? (I’ve always paid agents for commissions that were collected later even after they’ve left the agency, but I’m told that real estate agencies typically don’t do that).
Forget about the commission issue. File a police report for the theft. Notify the new broker that your are going to file a police report and file charges for the receipt of stolen property if anything is used by his/her new agent that belongs to you and he/she will also be included in any future lawsuits.
Also send a copy of the police report to the states licensing authority. Don’t wimp out, sound the charge, this kind of agent needs to be abolished. Also go back through your old files and start contacting clients.
Rich is correct - you are looking at more than just RE law and any written agreements with the former employee. You are also looking at the employment law that he mentioned regarding the commissions due. There are department of labor (or your state’s equivalent) laws regarding wages and benefits payouts upon employment termination, whether they quit or were fired. I learned about this last year when I fired an employee.
You may also need to be considering intellectual property law to address the prospective tenant leads. For my retail business, I have my company proprietary information defined, confidentiality agreements and non-compete agreements that employees have to sign as a condition of employment up front. This is to prevent someone from taking my data and going to a competitor or starting their own competing company based on attempting to steal my customers.
You definitely need an attorney familiar with your state laws and you might have to address them as two separate issues.
Best of luck!
P.S. I’m not an attorney and I don’t play one on TV.
Was the agent working as a contractor? Did you have an agreement regarding information that belongs to the business? Many “sales” types think they own the leads they develop and as a result many companies put terms in a “non compete” clause that restricts what they can do with the contacts they made while working on your dime.
You may have grounds to claim a theft of the information. I would contact an attorney to get sorted out what you have rights to and what you don’t. Employment law is not RE law and would require a different specialty to keep from shooting yourself in the foot.
I have received a notice to apear in small claims for the following…I put my home up for lease for a six month lease term in the MLS offering 3% of the lease term. After an agent showed the property he submits a rental agreement for his clients with a term of 1 year. I ended up agreeing to the year in the rental agreement, however the MLS showed I was only paying for a six month term. I was under the impression that once you showed a property you cannot go back and negotiate commissions. You must do this before you show the home. Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
She signed a non-compete agreement… and as a manager with access to such things, she managed to slip that out the door also!!! I wouldn’t have minded if she had kept copies but she took originals. I’ve sent a demand letter through an attorney (so far to no avail). This is quickly turning into a bigger and bigger mess. At this point, I’m praying that the DA will get involved and save me some legal fees.
