All Forum Posts by: Gwen Fyfe

@Karl Hadley, State Farm insured my duplex which has knob and tube in the attic. Give Chad Fields a call.

Oh, I didn't mean that I would ONLY do word of mouth, I would be posting it on craigslist and everything as well. But I really want to do everything I can to get someone local.

 LOL! My mortgage guy is already saying to me "Gwen, just so you know, I don't think you automatically become mayor by buying half of Bedford"... so I think I'm on the right path already!

Thank you for the laugh, that cracked me up. :)

A question on fair housing for our legal eagles...

I have a unit which I think is going to turn over soon. First time for me! For various reasons, I'd really like to get a tenant in there who has personal roots/ties in the town I'm in. So I want to really focus on word of mouth. For anyone local who refers a tenant to me, I'll be offering a referral fee of $100 to them personally or $125 to the charity of their choice.

What I wanted to do is talk to the neighbors around the unit, the owner of the local cafes (one of whom is also very involved in the large local Pagan group), maybe the head of the rotary club, and local religious congregation heads about it. I'll also post it to the town's Nextdoor and Facebook page, and the Queer Cleveland buy/sell/trade page.

My question is, could contacting clergy about this be considered discrimination in favor of a religious group? As mentioned, I would be doing the same thing with other groups. Our town is mostly Christian so I would be contacting a few churches, but there's also a Sikh gurdwara here who I would love to contact, and definitely my Pagan buddies would be finding out about it too.

Any thoughts?

 Chris, a side hustle is just something you do on the side to make a little extra money. There is no one thing people do for a side hustle. Part-time second job, dogsitting, whatever. Real estate is my side hustle right now.

Yeah, this is one of the things that really bothers me about him. Lots of investors aim for 100 units, before I had ever heard of Grant Cardone I was already thinking "you know, it would be really cool to have 1,000 for reasons x, y and z." I picked up the 10X book and... okay? What, I'm supposed to aim at 10,000 now because my goal was already 1,000? Ridiculous. Maybe someday that will be my goal, but just 10Xing for no reason seems dumb. 

I don't think it necessarily even makes sense to 10X my effort. I'm already exceeding my goals and I have a life outside real estate. Maybe it's a good mindset book for people to hear about if they're not hitting their initial goals, but... eh.

Okay. So it is that most landlords prefer to do it that way, rather than it being legally required.

The reasoning makes sense to me, I just hate to see new people given the impression something is legally required if it's not.

@Tom Ott That doesn't really make sense... if it was against state law why would cities allow you to do it? Larger government laws overrule smaller ones.

Anyway, this page from the Ohio bar says you can put it in the tenant's name: https://www.ohiobar.org/forpublic/resources/lawfac...

It's sounding like "keep the water in the owner's name" is common practice people think is actually required.

Edit: I'm obviously not giving anyone legal advice, I'm just an accountant raised by lawyers, so I'm persnickety about this stuff.

@Tom Ott Why do they need to stay in the owner's name?

 On the water thing - where is this idea that the landlord must pay the water coming from? Now that you brought it up, I've been reading around and it seems like people on BiggerPockets think that, but I can't see any substantiation for it outside this website. (Everyone seems to think this, not just you.)

Here's a page from Cleveland Tenant Rights saying the landlord can require the tenant to pay water as long as it's separately metered: http://www.clevelandtenants.org/for-tenants/tenant...

Here's a page from Garfield Heights specifically, saying the same thing: https://www.ghmc.org/renting/renting-basics/rights...

You must supply water, but you also must supply heat and electricity. You just need to make them available, not pay for them.

Anyway...

On the different towns: I decided what kind of property I wanted and then looked for a town where there were a lot of them. I settled on Bedford because it's also one of the few Cleveland suburbs which is C/B- class for good genuine reasons (the people here just aren't rich), rather than reasons like crime or poverty. I visited and it's a great little town with a lot of history, proud people and a lot going on. I'm a 5'2" unarmed woman and I'm happy to walk around at night.

Garfield Heights is also good, and I'm thinking about buying there when I start to do rehabs with my husband, but it's very different. I have a couple of young professional friends who live there, and the streets they're on are fine. But you have GOT to visit the individual street you're thinking of buying on. One street can be just peachy, and then two blocks away, the houses are half falling down, trash in the yards, probably at least one drug den on the street. If you find a good street, I think it's a great place to invest. One of the podcast guests said something along the line of "if you see young men moving into a neighborhood, buying houses and fixing them up to live in, the neighborhood is on its way up." It made sense to me because I'm seeing a lot of that with Garfield.

Edit: I just asked one of my friends who lives in Garfield (one guy in a single family home). He said his water and sewer together come to $30-$60, electricity and gas together usually come to around $100.