Brokers who did business with the star of the show Number 1 at CASA Christine Girouard during a bidding war found the context of their transaction with her “bizarre” and filed a complaint with the OACIQ following the broadcast of the La Presse investigation.
On the second day of the disciplinary hearings of brokers Christine Girouard and Jonathan Dauphinais-Fortin, her spouse, a real estate broker recounted the circumstances in which she had suffered from the alleged fraudulent scheme of the two Repentigny brokers.
The broker represented clients who wanted to buy a property sold by Christine Girouard. After having submitted a promise to purchase, she said that the star broker called her to tell her that a higher offer was on the table.
“As I was a broker in the sector, we knew each other a little and she preferred to do the transaction with me, she asked me if my clients were ready to increase their prices a little,” explained this broker to the committee.
According to the purchase promises that La Presse obtained during its investigation, this broker’s offer was in fact the highest of the three promises received for this property sold by Ms. Girouard.
The second promise to purchase was $2000 lower than that of this broker. The third offered at least $100,000 less.
This much lower promise to purchase was also presented by the broker Jonathan Dauphinais-Fortin, then an employee of Ms. Girouard. Mr. Dauphinais-Fortin drafted the document by listing as buyer the name of his long-time friend who had not visited the said property.
Rather than improving her clients’ offers, the broker who testified before the committee on Tuesday in Brossard asked Ms. Girouard to arrive with a counter-offer from her sellers. However, she did not understand why this counter-offer was several tens of thousands of dollars higher than the asking price and her first offer.
“Since we had looked at the comparisons sold, my advice was to refuse the counter-proposal from the sellers,” she explained.
A few days later, when she decided to check the firm sale price of the property, the broker was surprised to see that it had not been sold.
It was only by reading the La Presse article several months later that she made the connection and decided to file a complaint with the OACIQ “for the credibility of Quebec brokers”.
“I was afraid that my clients that I represented would think that I was involved in some scam. »
The broker who made the second promise to purchase on behalf of his clients also had a clue. “I saw the house hadn’t been sold and I thought it was weird,” he said.
In the days following his collaboration with Ms. Girouard, he even wrote notes recounting the course of events with the aim of filing a complaint.
“I saw that it was not normal, the events that had happened and the way it had been managed,” the broker argued during the hearing.
The four brokers, who testified Tuesday, described the overheating environment plaguing the 2021 and 2022 real estate market, calling it “reactive,” “on fire” and “spectacular.”
These four witnesses also explained to the committee the psychological impact of multiple offers on a buyer, in particular that knowing that another is added to the race encourages him to offer more money to win the auction.
The disciplinary committee has scheduled two weeks of hearings, from September 25 to October 6, to determine whether the two respondents are guilty of the acts with which they are accused. According to the trustee, the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that Christine Girouard and Jonathan Dauphinais-Fortin implemented a fraudulent scheme aimed at encouraging buyers to improve their initial promise to purchase by submitting a bogus promise to purchase to sellers.
