Does your Oahu Property Management Company take steps to protect your property from exposure to online scams and fraud?
The answer is YES, if you work with Home Shoppe Hawaii Property Management. Home Shoppe Hawaii manages rental properties in Kailua, Honolulu rentals, and Oahu rental properties in other areas of the island.
At Home Shoppe Hawaii, we rely on the Internet to market our available Oahu rental properties beyond Honolulu County. The Internet is the best place for maximum global exposure for Oahu rentals. Our award winning property management software, Appfolio, has a unique marketing feature that blasts our available properties to over thirty rental property Internet sites worldwide. These 
Watermarks identify photo ownership, and deter would-be thieves.sites include Trulia, Zillow, Rent.com, Hotpads.com, Apartment.com, to name just a few. We also market our Oahu rental properties on Craigslist. As a result, our Home Shoppe Hawaii rental properties have wide-spread visibility which leads to quick rental.
Unfortunately, like many other Honolulu property management companies and independent landlords, Home Shoppe Hawaii has also had our ads hi-jacked by criminals. Sadly, rental fraud is becoming more and more prevalent in Honolulu and other areas of Oahu. Rental scams usually occur when the ads for property for sale or for rent are stolen by would-be fraudsters. These criminals take legitimate information and photos and market our Oahu rental properties or homes for sale in Honolulu County as their own rentals. The rental scammers make-up plausible stories to convince people to rent these properties sight-unseen and to send deposits, which are then stolen. Usually, the properties are advertised at under-market price points, that seem to good to be true, to encourage many applicants.
For example, Home Shoppe Hawaii was recently called by some scam victims who had paid a $900 deposit to rent unit 1206 in a Kailua condominium building. They found me online and asked me to look up the name of the Kailua property manager to see if the person was a REALTOR. These poor fraud victims had recently arrived on-island, expecting to move in and could not get in touch with their supposed “Kailua property manager.” They came to find out there there was no 12th floor in the building that they thought they had rented in and the address they rented did not even exist. Needless to say, the person with whom they made contact also was not a REALTOR. I did some investigating and found out the photos used for the Kailua rental were from a 2 bedroom unit that has been for sale, on a lower floor of the same building. The phone number they had used to contact the supposed Kailua landlord was now disconnected. This was not a Home Shoppe Hawaii ad that was hi-jacked, but a disturbing story nevertheless.
Home Shoppe Hawaii’s Multi-Step Approach to Deal With Rental Scams
The following multi-step process helps to protect our Oahu property management clients from unwanted hassle and the public from potential loss and heartache associated with rental scams.
1. Watermarks. Home Shoppe Hawaii is now watermarking all of our rental photos – this is intended to alert potential victims to the fact that the pictures are stolen from Home Shoppe Hawaii and are not the property of the fraudster.
2. Signage. We place both our Home Shoppe Hawaii Property Management vinyl window sticker and, when possible, our outdoor street sign on the property – this is send a clear message to visitors of the property that the property is under professional property management. 
Street sign not only advertises the property, but alerts potential renters that the property is under professional management.
3. Personal Viewings. Home Shoppe Hawaii Property Management maintains a strict policy that no application for rental property is complete without a viewing of both the inside and the outside of the premises. If the propective tenant cannot view the Oahu rental property personally, he or she is required to appoint a representative to view the property for them.
4. Google® Alerts. Finally, and most importantly, we set up a Google® alert for all of our Oahu rental properties. Google® alerts work to scan the Internet for a particular phrase – daily – and alert the user of the discovery of the information.
For our Oahu rental properties we generate alerts for the address of the property — partial address and full address. Google® sends us an email each day (or more frequently when the property is being marketed) if the address is detected by their crawlers. It provides us the link to the location, and we can immediately address any potential instances of fraud. Ad hi-jackers can strike at any time – and so we maintain these Google® alerts through-out the course of our management of the property.
What Can You Do to Help Prevent Rental Fraud on Oahu?
One of the most important steps in combatting fraud, is awareness of the problem. Also:
~ Report fraudulent ads and tell your friends and family about information you have seen or received.
~ Never give your personal information or send money without first having seen the inside of the property. A legitimate Oahu property manager or landlord will meet you at the rental property to show you the inside.
~ Know that if a stated rent seems too good to be true - it probably is.
~ Check to see if the advertised Property Manager is licensed. Property managers on Oahu are not always required to be licensed (there are a few exceptions, such as when an owner rents out his or her own property, which does not require a real estate license), but having a property manager with a real estate license listed is one clue that the ad may be legitimate. You can check on a property manager’s real estate license here.
~ Be wary and do your own Google® search for the Oahu property address - you may just find the legitimate landlord and ad in your search!
For more information on how Home Shoppe Hawaii works to protect your Oahu investment property, please contact Yvonne Ahearn (B) at (808) 721-8088.