- Report: #1391645
Complaint Review: First American Exchange Company - San Jose California
Reported By:
Mcollins88 -
Costa Mesa, California, USA
Submitted:
Updated:
-
Author Confirmed
Why?
First American Exchange Company
1737 N 1st St San Jose, California, USA
Phone:
(408) 451-7950
Web:
https://firstexchange.com
Categories:
Business Rating:
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First American Exchange Company, Michelle Mautz Rude, Unprofessional, dishonest, lacking skills. San Jose California
My fiancé works in the real estate industry and was doing a 1031 exchange with Michelle Mautz. She made a technical error in the paperwork and is now holding over 200,000 dollars of our money hostage for 180 days...for absolutely no reason at all.
Michelle is rude and unprofessional... AVOID this company at all costs...Especially if you want to facilitate a 1031 exchange with someone who actually knows what they're doing.
1 Updates & Rebuttals
Carmine
Nevada,United States
Rebuttal to complaint
#2UPDATE Employee
Mon, July 01, 2019
I am Michelle Mautz's manager and I would like to clarify this matter. At the time of the transaction, I was made aware of the situation and Michelle handled the situation as required by company and IRS guidelines.
When a client does a 1031 Exchange, they are required to identify replacement properties within the first 45 days of their transaction. In this situation, the client identified 1 replacement property asset to be acquired.
After the 45 days expired, the client called back into the office requesting that Michelle assist with the acquisition of a non-identified property. After reviewing the situation, we determined that we could not assist with this acquisition per the IRS code.
The 1031 code also requires that if a taxpayer involved in an exchange identifies any property within the 45 day identification period, we cannot release the funds in the 1031 Exchange account until after the 180 days of the exchange expires, which ended up happening in this transaction.
We had previously sent emails to our client in this transaction explaining the rules of identification and for the release of funds. This was a situation where the client found property that they wanted to purchase after the 45 day identification period expired, and we were unable to assist in the purchase of that property nor were we able to release the funds back to the client per Section 1031. That specific code section which explains this is Treas. Reg. 1.1031(k)-(1)(g)(6).
You stated in your report that we were "holding over $200,000 dollars of our money hostage for 180 days...for absolutely no reason at all". That is not true. We had communicated with your tax professional and to your fiance that this was the situation due to Section 1031 as shown above. Your tax professional understood the situation completely.
We apologize that we were not able to live up to our client's expectations in this matter, but as a Qualified Intermediary, we are bound to enforce the rules under Section 1031.
