All Forum Posts by: James DeRoest

The way to find a water leak within the units is to look for a large patch of water. It's usually wet.

The only thing you have to worry about are toilets that run continuously. And even then, they don't use huge amounts of water. If a toilet runs at full pressure, the tenant is going to call you sooner than later from the sheer racket it's making.

If you are purely looking for leaks, you will spend significant sums of money to save yourself very little money in the long run. 

But going back to the "wet patch", for a leak to actually hurt financially, you are looking at 10s of thousands of gallons. Even the most ardent slum tenant will call you after the first 1000 gallons rips through their home.

 Animal control will pick up the dog if there is no owner available. Simple as that.

How they determine the length of time they will keep a dog is another thing. The norm seems to be that a stray pit mix will be put down within 24 hours.

Which is how we came to have our chucklehead bulldog. Someone left him at my mother in laws, we happened to be there but he had a fantastic personality. Pride of the litter, a proper "petey dog", full of mange, underweight, 18 months old. Just dropped him off. A few thousand dollars later, we have a superb looking dog and a veterinary wing named after us.

I thought I'd mention that because not every dog that is abandoned gets a bad ending. Ours certainly didn't. There are happy stories out there.

Someone said that to my wife during a showing "don't worry about no fence, we will just stake the dogs out to that tree".

She told them straight, there and then to their face, "you won't be our tenant. We do not want dogs staked out in Florida heat. This showing has finished". And then showed them to the door.

After she locked up, they tried to back track, asked for an application and she looked then between the eyes and in her best southern trash she said "this ain't happening" and walked off.

I'm with Sue on this one. We've shown units before they were ready, and you occasionally then get that tenant who is really picky - they cop an attitude that it's like they are buying a new house when they move in. Always on the phone "this ain't quite right" "that ain't quite right".

For the most part we don't do it as it takes a special tenant who can look past building debris and see their future home in your wreckage.

Having said that, our last few turnovers have been mid 'mess' but because we're getting recommended by our existing tenants, new tenants have no problems believing that we are good to our word. We haven't advertised in 6 months and would you believe it - we have a waiting list. How ridiculous is that?

Err, no they don't.

We're back to the bad old days of lending. Got a pulse? Here's some money.

Ok, so you have to offer to the tenants first, but that still doesn't mean you shouldn't get an appraisal from a realtor.

Unless you've chronically overpaid the property, why come out behind? Get the price from the realtor, give it to the tenants to see if they'll bite (they won't), tick the box that says you complied with the law, and give notice for the lease not being renewed in September. But make sure you give the proper notice for September.

Take possession, get it sold, chalk it up to a life experience.

Brexit isn't going to change a thing. Markets will recover, exchange rates will recover (think they already have), and absolutely nothing will happen.

If the various European nations do start having exit votes, and if they do start leaving, then you will simply see a more robust world market in the medium to long term.

 I don't think it is unacceptable. This is the problem of cities having rent control - the market gets out of line with real values. So this guy has been living in a million dollar apartment for far too long, paying way under the market rate.

And it's not like there is no where else for him to go with $1800pm available to him to pay rent. It just won't be in a millionaire neighborhood in the center of San Francisco.

Now I'll throw this out there - maybe - just maybe - he should have bought a house at some point in his life.

FFS grow a sense of humor.

Err. Not entirely sure I should be used to back anything up really. I'm so laid back that I do drywall mudding in flipflops. Actually, I do most of my renovations in flipflops. Not cheap flipflops, these ones cost $15 from Wal*mart.