<human>: Can you summarize the given text in a few sentences?

Okay so me and two other girls decided to live off campus at University this year. We found an apartment and decided we liked it fairly quickly. The real estate company detailed that we should put down a payment for first and last months rent, security deposit, brokers fee and application fee. It totaled around a little over 2,000 dollars.  

A few weeks after we put the money down, one of my roommates calls me and tells me that due to financial issues she can't live in the apartment anymore. She was supposed to furnish the apartment so basically the other roommate and I are screwed out of it too. So we let the real estate agent know and she tells us that we can't have our money back unless we find someone else to take the apartment.

So after a month of looking for people, this past week we had 3 different groups of people interested in the apartment. I got another inquiry about it only to hear from the real estate agent that the landlord had already sold the place. Because of this apparently we still don't get our money back.

My biggest defense is that we were never given a deadline for when to find someone. If we had known that this was the case we would have expedited the process significantly. This is a shady company so I'm looking for any legal advice that I can get to muscle them out.
<bot>: Put money down on an apartment, decided we didn't want it. Landlord found people to take our place, now the real estate company is trying to keep our money.