Real Estate

Could a CT real estate scam have been stopped by catching a typo?


A spelling error small enough for even a careful reader to miss, on a land deed filed more than a decade ago, might have halted the property sale fraud that’s causing a stir in Fairfield with a $1.5 million house in dispute. 

But like that house built on the very same parcel at 51 Sky Top Terrace, no one caught the mistake before a developer unwittingly bought the property from a sham seller for $350,000 last October and spent months and hundreds of thousands of dollars more. Or maybe someone did catch the glitch before the sale and didn’t act on it.  

Either way, the seemingly tiny error on a deed for the land brings to light a largely hidden step in the sale of real estate — title searches — and raises the stakes on a controversy over how they should be done. Jacqueline Purcell, president of the title searchers association in Connecticut, sees the error — a typo, basically — as a big deal that speaks volumes.

There for all to see, or more likely, to gloss over, is the 2010 “trustee deed” in which a family trust granted full ownership of the wooded, 0.45-acre lot to Daniel Kenigsberg, who was already part of the trust. 

“Know ye, that DANIEL KENIGSBERG, Co-Trustee of the ESTHER S. KENIGBERG TRUST, dated Oct. 7, 1991, and SAMUEL L. BRAUNSTEIN, Successor Co-Trustee of the ESTHER S. KENIGBERG TRUST…do grant, bargain, sell and confirm unto the said DANIEL KENIGSBERG, all right, title, interest, claim and demand…”

This trustee deed from 2010 misspelled the name of the family trust that transfeered ownership of the land that was sold in an apparent scam last October on Sky Top Terrace in Fairfield. 

Fairfield records screen shot

Did you catch the error? “Kenigberg” in the name of the trust should be spelled “Kenigsberg,” with an s in the middle. I missed it when I read the same document as I reported my July 30 column on this odd case, possibly the only one in the United States in which a house was built on land purchased by a sham seller.  

‘I would have marked it as defective’



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