How I came to know Mike Cade of Prime Realtors Property Management and the various ways he went about stealing my rent money, security and pet deposits, and other money and how to fight back!
I was referred to Mike Cade in 2006 from an acquaintance who had recently started using his company “Prime Realtors Property Management” and was happy to date. I was looking for a new property manager since I had just had two in a row that were not doing a good job and in one case was actually doing a terrible job.
For the first year and a half, I had few problems with Mike (mostly accounting problems) but overall he was doing a better job than the previous two were.
Around 2008 things started to go bad. Mike Cade was starting to send my rents that he had collected later and later. In the beginning, he had promised to pay by the 20th of the month, but often paid sooner. By 2008, Mike wasn’t paying until early the following month. By the end of 2008, he would often send the rents in the middle of the following month.
Every couple of months, I’d call Mike and put pressure on him and grill him as to why my rent money wasn’t being paid on time. The next month or two, he’d send the rents earlier.
The other issue that kept on growing was repairs. All of a sudden, I was getting hit with major repairs every single month on multiple units. This led to more accounting “mistakes” where he would bill me for putting in new carpet one month, then “accidentally” bill me for the same carpet again the next month or month after. Of course the problem with him billing me for these things is that he calculates everything he’s billing me for and subtracts that amount from the rent money that he sends me. This means that every time I find a problem with his accounting, I have to prove it to him, get him to agree with me on it, then get him to send me the money that he took (which I could rarely get him to send).
There were other months where he charged me for a plumbing bill at several hundred dollars, then included the same bill in the next month’s expenses.
whenever I would ask him why he keeps screwing up and double billing me, he’d blame his “incompetent” staff (his discription, not mine) or the software they use. Interesting that his incompetent staff and software never mistakenly gave me too much money. Why is that? The laws of probability say that if it’s an honest mistake, it should happen an equal number of times in my favor as his, but never does.
Another interesting mistake made several times by Mike Cade at Prime Realtors Property Management would be to report that a tenant hadn’t paid rent at the time that the statements went out so they’d mark the income for the month as zero. The next month they’d show the tenant had paid rent for the new month as usual but no record of the missing previous month. Then when I look at the rent paid Year To Date column, it shows they did pay but Mike never sent it to me. The ironic part is that he WOULD take out his cut of the “management fee” of the rent he supposedly never collected!
The point there is simple, if he never collected the rent then he should have applied the previous months rent to the rent outstanding. If the tenant never paid anything then they should have been evicted. According to Mike’s statements, the tenant just skipped a month’s rent and he did nothing even though according to the Year To Date, the missing rent was collected… Can you say BS??
Yet another example is a tenant would be evicted and would forfeit their security deposits, but Mike never bothers to send those deposits to me, despite billing me for all of the repairs needed that the deposit should have covered.
So after all the accounting “mistakes” we get to early 2010. Mike is as usual is quite late in sending me the rent payments. January bleeds into February and February bleeds into March and Mike still hasn’t sent me a dime of my rent money. By now I’m calling and emailing Mike Cade several times a week. His voicemail on his cell phone is always full and he’s supposedly never in the office. Now I’m getting worried. Around this time, I got a call from the person that referred me to Mike in the first place saying that Mike was supposed to be paying the mortgage payments on his property with the rent collected and that the mortgage company had just notified him that Mike Cade had bounced two mortgage payment checks in a row and they were getting ready to take action. At this point the floodgates opened up and I found out that Mike owed over $50,000 to another client.
At this point I decided to get out before mike could collect and steal another month’s rents from me. I quickly started searching for and found another property management company. I sent Prime Realtors Property management and Mike Cade an email and left phone messages for them letting them know that I switched and that they are not to accept any more rents or any other money from tenants (which they did anyway and haven’t given back to me) and that my new PM company would be coming by to get the keys, leases, and security deposits, etc…
Well, I’d like to act suprised but really wasn’t when we got a call from the new property manager saying that prime realtors property management did not have the security deposit, pet deposit, or last months rents to return to us. Keep in mind that money is not supposed to be touched. From the day the tenant gives that money to us, it is suppsosed to go into a trust account and stay there until they move out. Mike Cade stole that money as well as all of my rents.
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I read your story. We were screwed by another realtor, Cynthia Hickman, in 2 fraudulent real estate deals 4 years ago. She took $74,000 from us and we learned $100,000 from a woman in Garland. We filed police report & she got 10 years probation in Parker Co. for our theft and another 10 years probation in Dallas Co. for the other lady. We sued her & broker and recovered some of the money. We got a judgement and filed with TREC Recovery Fund for the rest. We are trying to recover the rest of the money, but they only allowed $5000 in atty fees for 4 years. We spent nearly $25,000 in atty fees. Would like to know if you recovered all your money? They said they only pay atty fees for after we file w/TREC. Also, they didn’t allow anything for interest. Web site misleading.