On October 1, 2025, a property management firm here in Charlotte NC lost its license. Revoked. Below is a copy of the direct write up from the NCREC Bulletin and this hits home, because I did meet with this broker back in 2023. He was interested in my services, but opted to pass and wanted to just know more about the firm I had left as an employee than what I could do to help. Now seeing this happen two years after is quite sad that the reality of what was about to happen, happened. Did someone else step in and failed? Or was this a true testament of "It won't happen to me!" It is the biggest punch in the gut as I know what "not asking for help" really means as any attempt to try to get the books right is better than not in the eyes of the REC.
The Real Estate Commission's record is public and only reason I share is the core of why I started SCOREE Services, and it reads like a list of everything that goes wrong quietly in a trust account: accounts never designated as trust accounts, security deposit money sitting in a certificate of deposit instead of a demand account, rent money landing in the operating account, no bank reconciliations and no trial balance reconciliations performed. Its broker in charge received a three-year suspension and five years of ineligibility to serve as a broker in charge again. LINK: https://bulletins.ncrec.gov/2025/10/
Trust account trouble sits behind about one in five of all the Commission's discipline cases. One in five. That number tells me this is not a story about one bad broker. It is a story about how many brokers are carrying a back end they cannot see into, right up until the day the Commission sees into it for them. Believe it or not, outside of what this case findings were, software settings and workflows are a common factor I see more often than the case above. Had I known more of the pain points, I would have referred him to a Trust Accounting CPA firm and we have one right here in NC and I partner with another in Pennsylvania. Two very reputable companies that help with that level of understanding. And let me emphasize this, because many firms need exactly that: a trust accounting CPA. There is no shame in it. It is a specialty, and most firms were never staffed for it.
My role is a different one, and it sits right beside theirs. I am a financial and systems controller. My work is to help with your workflows and fix the data, so that you have clean three way reconciliations. We work as a team to get there. It streamlines everything when you do not have the staff who can support that level of understanding in the financials and the data. That is what SCOREE Services LLC does, in a nutshell.
I am a Charlotte NARPM affiliate. I have done this work full time since 2019 and relocated in 2024 to support others in Charlotte and across the United States. The question I cannot put down is a simple one. Why didn't he ask for someone's help?
Somewhere between the first skipped reconciliation and a revoked license, there were a hundred ordinary days when a phone call would have changed the ending. Reconciliations fall behind in busy firms. Settings drift. A deposit process gets loose because the person who built it left. None of that is a character flaw. All of it is fixable, while it is still small, by someone who knows how the money is supposed to move.
Asking for help is not an admission that you are failing. It is how you stay the broker who never has to explain yourself to the Commission and learn the WHY in what the bookkeeper or contracted services hired are doing.
This is me saying it plainly to every broker and firm owner reading this, local or not: reach out before it is urgent. Get educated on your own back end while the questions are still boring. Learn what your trust account is doing while the answer is still something you can fix on a Tuesday.
I often stress, the areas I know from financial data to software settings and workflows/timing is not expected to be master's from the operations or sales force behind what makes a portion of the PM firm moving, this backend DOES make you money and we pay for ourselves in the long run and my services in seat as an employee and now a contracted services is a testament to that with my clients. Others do not see the value and maybe this was the case here. I hope this story brings more to sign up for my educational blogs and maybe some of the micro-learning courses in Skool Community can help. I also offer one-on-one training in the visual parts of your software specifically Rentvine, Propertyware and recently, AppFolio.
I would rather teach a room full of brokers how their money moves than watch one more firm learn it from an investigator.
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