A Maryland realtor and a North Carolina-based FBI agent are facing federal bribery charges for allegedly working with a D.C. official to get inside information on pending D.C. home sales in which tenants would have the legal right to purchase the property first.

The charges allege the realtor then used this information to purchase tenants’ rights of sale and arrange to sell the properties for a profit.

According to charging documents filed in federal court last week, realtor Brian W. Bailey repeatedly bribed an official with the D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development to get advance notice of pending sales where the city’s Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, or TOPA, would apply. The decades-old law gives tenants in the District the first chance to buy their homes when the owner moves to sell them, and also allows those tenants to turn purchasing rights over to someone else.

A warrant for Bailey’s arrest alleges that after getting the notices of sales—which included the names of the tenants living in the properties—he would ask FBI Special Agent David Paitsel, based in Asheville, North Carolina, to use a law enforcement database to look up phone numbers and email addresses for those tenants. Bailey would then contact those tenants and arrange to purchase their TOPA rights, giving him the first opportunity to buy those homes.

While the city does make notices of sale public, it does not include the names of tenants living in those properties. And those notices often come weeks after a property is put on the market.

In one specific case in 2017, the D.C. official—who is not named—allegedly gave Bailey inside information on a possible sale of a four-unit building on 15th Street Northwest in Columbia Heights, including the names of the tenants living there. At Bailey’s request, the case alleges, Paitsel looked up and provided Bailey with contact information, which Bailey then used to contact a tenant and purchase their TOPA rights for $10,000.

“Hey Bro… I owe you 5k!!!” Bailey wrote to Paitsel in an email included in the arrest warrant. “I found [the tenant]… He assigned his rights over to me. I’m going to flip the contract to another investor who has already escrowed the money to purchase the property.”

For any searches that resulted in a successful sale, Bailey allegedly paid Paitsel $5,000. For selling the property in Columbia Heights to an Oregon-based investor, Bailey netted $251,465, the warrant alleges. Another property in Eckington that Bailey was connected to, according to the charges, was redeveloped into luxury condos; a Shaw property he handled is in the process of being redeveloped. (There are no allegations that the purchasers of these homes knew of what Bailey was doing.)

Neither Bailey nor Paitsel responded to an email seeking comment. An email to an attorney representing Paitsel also went unreturned. The Department of Housing and Community Development, which oversees all TOPA sales, said it could not comment “as the investigation is ongoing and is being handled by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”

The 38-year-old TOPA law has long been lauded as one of D.C.’s best tools to keep tenants in their homes, especially as the housing market has heated up. But it has also faced challenges: Renters have to organize quickly when their building is put on the market, and they are often left to find willing partners to help finance the purchase and renovation of a property. In 2017, there were 1,970 offers of sale filed with DHCD, but only in 38 properties did a tenant organization register to exercise TOPA rights.

Homeowners and realtors have also complained that the law’s provision allowing tenants to sell their TOPA rights to third parties has been exploited in certain cases, and that some tenants have demanded large payouts to not use their TOPA rights and delay a possible sale. Last year, the D.C. Council passed a law exempting single-family homes from TOPA, meaning that a tenant of a single-family home or a basement apartment now has no TOPA rights when the home is sold.

D.C.’s hot real estate market has driven rent and housing costs up in recent years, and has also increased the pressure on buyers and developers to acquire properties—sometimes through illegal means. Last year, a South Carolina man was sentenced to 18 months in jail for illegally filing forged deeds to take ownership and later sell two homes that belonged to other people. And in late 2017, Ward 5 Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie  warned that senior citizens were being sent fake notices that could trick them into selling their homes.

This story originally appeared on WAMU, and has been updated to clarify that there are no allegations against the purchasers of the homes Bailey sold.