ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — For Nikita Jones and her two daughters, this two-bedroom, one-bath house in St. Petersburg was finally home.
“I had been homeless for eight months, already with two kids. I was sleeping in my truck. My kids were staying with my friend,” Jones said.
Praying for a miracle, a co-worker let her know of someone she knew who could possibly help her find a place to live.
“I had to fill out an application with her. I paid the application fee. She ended up sending me this address. She told me to go by it but I couldn't get in," Jones said. "I was looking through the windows. And I said, ‘OK. This, this is OK for me and my kids.’
"I paid her $5,100 to get in here. That was first, last and deposit. She said the rate was $1,700 a month so I had to pay $1,700 three times. I ended up getting the key delivered to my job, and that's when I proceeded to live here.”
But she says now she has to move back into her truck again.
“I have been paying her over a course of months $1,700 a month to find out that the house is not even under me, it is under somebody else. I have just been victimized by her. Now I'm facing eviction with two kids,” Jones said.
She says she found an eviction notice on her front door. The eviction notice was not in her name. Instead, it listed “Annesse Maxwell.” That’s when she started messaging the woman who got her into this house in the first place, and then she contacted a lawyer.
“In this case, when I saw that, in fact, rent had been paid for a period of time that was being included in the eviction complaint, I knew that was a problem," lawyer Lynn Hanshaw said. "And when I saw the names, they didn't match. And when I spoke to Nikita, she didn't know who the defendant was who was supposed to be living in this property, Annesse Maxwell.
"She had never heard of the landlord. She didn't understand why she was getting sued with paperwork. We originally thought maybe they had the wrong address because it was so different than what was actually happening because Nikita lives here with her kids. There is nobody else here. So that's what kind of started it."
Then, Hanshaw says she looked to see if "Annesse Maxwell" had any other eviction notices and found filings in counties across the Tampa Bay area.
"All for pretty much the same period of time where 'Annesse Maxwell' has been a tenant somewhere for the same period of time,” Hanshaw said.
So then, we contacted the landlords of the property who let us know that “Annesse Maxwell” never showed up for the eviction hearings. The current "tenants," though, did.
One even wrote a letter to a judge, saying that she should not be evicted because she went through an agency called Luxury Home Services, paid $8,100 to a woman named Angel East to move in, and then paid her $2,700 a month for rent.
But then, she received an eviction notice made out to an “Annesse Maxwell.” The tenant wrote in the letter she does not know an “Annesse Maxwell” and when she asked East for her money back she claimed her "business partner Annesse Maxwell had it."
“She's not targeting people that would have the sophistication to go to a property management company," Henshaw said. "She's targeting people who are saying, ‘I can't get a place, I don't qualify for a place, I am desperate for a place.’ Those are the very people that she's targeted. This is this is an organized mess.”
We found East’s Facebook page that had plenty of postings with ads saying she can help you find your new home. Over the past two years, she’s posted companies she says she is behind, from Luxury Home Listing to United Property Finders to the most recent Real Property Management.
Ads with her photo saying "now accepting new clients for ‘Property Placement.’"
“I’m tired now," Jones said. "I got to do all of this still, I got to move. I got to find my kids someplace else to stay. You took me for everything that I got.
"I'm strong enough that I'm going to make sure my kids got a place to stay. But it sucks that I have to go through this because I seeked [sic] help from somebody who took advantage of me and my children.”
We spoke with the Department of Business and Professional Regulations, a state agency that licenses realtors. They tell us they do have an open investigation into East and the companies mentioned above. They tell us this is not the first time they have heard of something like this happening.
They say anyone dealing with any company making a real estate transaction should look up their license number. You can find that here.
If you are renting from a site where there is no realtor involved, only the owner of the listing, verify that’s the person listed as the owner of the property by visiting the property appraiser’s office website in your county, like this one for Pinellas County.
We did reach East by phone, and when we tried to get her side of the story, she told us, “If they got evicted, they didn’t pay their rent to the landlord,” then hung up.