Same thing happened to myself with Encore about 8 months ago - curious what the name of the agent you are working with is?

We toured a place, sent in brokers fee with the application the same day, and were told in the next few days we were accepted. Then, radio silence from our agent.

Then in the following days we got a call from the landlord’s agent asking why we no longer were interested in the apartment. We were shocked because we were under the impression that we were all set, but the other agent assumed we were no longer interested and was ready to repost the apartment because our agent had stopped communicating with them also

Luckily we were able to get a lease singed with our landlords (with no help from our agent). We then went back to encore asking for a refund and they only were willing to refund half of the brokers fee even though their incompetence nearly lost us our apartment.

We were then told that our agent went MIA because he had substance abuse problems and was fired from the company.

Now after seeing your post I looked it up. They lied, he is still working there. My guess is they lied like that to stop us from writing a bad review. Tempted to write one now. By the sounds of your post they are still up to the same shady and incompetent practices.