Buyer, and seller beware

LARAMIE — Stephanie Fortman had a gut feeling about a sale of some land near Laramie. Something wasn’t right.

The seller told her he was building a house and wanted to sell the property quickly, below market value, to finance his new home.

“Quickly,”Fortman, an associate broker at Mountain Valley Properties said. “That’s a word I learned — quickly.”

The reason for the speed, she eventually discovered, is that the seller was trying to profit from selling a piece of property he didn’t own.

In the absence of concrete evidence, Fortman moved ahead with the sale. But she couldn’t help but feel that...