Some friends and I rented home from Remax of the Poconos at Timber Trails/Lake Naomi, and they were a little unethical when it came to the deposit return.

They gave us a an instruction packet with the incorrect checkout time (NOON), which resulted in their cleaning service coming before we were gone. Because of this, they deducted a cleaning penalty from our deposit. The reason I was given was because our contract said 10am. While this may be true, the fact remains that they gave us the wrong information, and none of us thought to cross-reference the contract during our stay, because we were told that their info packet would have everything we needed.

We did contact them, but it let only to unprofessional/very not nice replies - the highlights of which included non-responses at first, then them admitting that they messed up but said that they're shouldn't be accountable; and finally them implying that we shouldn't be upset, because they only took a small amount from us. In the end we were penalized $35, which is not a big amount, but as with most things it's the principle. No amount of money is acceptable to wrongly take from people.

As renters, we leave ourselves pretty vulnerable with regards to paying everything upfront, and we can only trust that the realty agents will be honorable about it. This was definitely not the case with Re/Max of the Poconos. It was only $35 for us, but I'm sure there are many other clerical errors that they can make that could result in higher fines. I would highly caution against doing business with these folks.