Hi, Everyone,

I am a novice real estate investor in Florida and in my city, there is one team of agents who claims that they are number 1 top selling agent in the local market and they said there has been about 160 sales for the past year. The number of agents is about 6 or 7 agents and they combined their sales under one team, which makes their performance very outstanding..

That team put a lot of ad on everywhere such as zillow, trulia and local radios. I saw many houses was listed by this team of agents. The properties listed by this team always have a much higher price than similar listings. I thought that these houses couldn't be sold easily.What makes me feel fishy is that  these houses were sold very quickly and usually within 1 week(I normally saw a sign which said "Pending"). After the listing is under contract, I would still keep an eye on those listings. One month or two later, I checked the county's public records. There were no such transactions or deed transfer recorded for those properties even if that team of agents provided an record at Zillow.com that the property was sold at which date.

Have anyone notice a similar phenomena in your area? I would like to share my observation with other via this forum and alert other investors if there is something wrong behind it. I suppose that many investor tend to choose real estate agents with a lot of sales record. Or maybe any seasoned investor may shed light on these "transactions".

I am looking forward to any other's comments on this topic and let us learn from each other.