All Forum Posts by: Jim K.

@John D.

@Chris Youssi

Setting the comps is quite likely happening here in western Pennsylvania, too. I know of an flipping outfit that turned a $5000 REO into a $127,000 sale. The flip was around the corner and up the street from a property of mine. They then pulled the same game on a $25,500 REO and sold it for $150,000. As luck would have it, this was also around the corner and down the street from another property of mine.

Oh sure, great business sense, great opportunity, great good luck, more power to them!

I know that everyone in this game has all kinds of stories, but I have addresses, names, recorded dates of sale and amounts. I also have deed records for the eight other properties in the area that the same outfit owns within the same square mile. Nobody ever promised me when I got into it that the business of real estate was bursting at the seams with deeply moral actors who had clean hands and pure hearts.

The legal way to do it would be to trick those condos out like nobody's business, write ad copy screaming "MUST-SEE ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME-OPPORTUNITY LA-DOLCE-VITA-CAN-BE-YOURS FOR ONLY $275,000!!!" and wait for the right imbeciles to come along to start talking to your real estate agent about enhancing their lifestyles.

Imbeciles will come, Thomas.

@Michael Neves

Steel wool in the holes. I'm going to second what @Matthew Paul said. You want snap traps inside because you don't want your tenant's pets or kids eating rat poison baits. Tomcat makes a disposable bait station that kids and animals supposedly can't get into, I don't trust those.

@Jessica Wood

Good luck, Jessica. I know it's a pain, and I suspect most people in your immediate circle probably have trouble understanding how personally insulting the entire process is.

@Jessica Wood

If it's a standard ten-buck doorknob made by Defiant or Kwikset or Schlage or pretty much any other major American manufacturer, there's a very simple solution if you ever really do need entry, if there ever really IS an emergency. Get a cordless drill and a set of drill bits. Google "drill out a lock."

So you do have the capability to enter in the case of an emergency -- you just have to have to destroy a $10 lock to do it. Don't use it unless you have to. Stay the course of the eviction, follow the letter of the law. This is not about who has the power and the control. You want this done with the minimal fuss possible. Get your emotions out of it. Stifle any and all feelings of "I'd like to..." that might lead to escalating conflict.

@Christopher Freeman

@Account Closed has the simplest solution. Look forward. This problem is not going to get better. In the future, your tenants will want more and more, better and better web access. Get ahead of the problem and stay ahead of it.

There's been a lot of action in my area and from what I've heard in the Baltimore area as well by out-of-state investors. Generally speaking, these are beginners looking to buy high-cashflow rental properties. The investors are typically talking about setting up a "power team." Agents are of course the first people they call, the first key member on these power teams. Agents are asked about lenders and contractors and quickly understand that they're supposed to put together the power team and supervise it for the investor.

Next comes the property hunting. The agent is supposed to visit a place deep in the ghetto, taking pictures and emailing them back to the investors. Then the agent is directed to write a lowball offer with a very low probability of being accepted. After the lowball offer fails, it's off to the next property and the next lowball offer. It takes a dozen or more lowball offers on a dozen or more ghetto properties, of course, until someone finally accepts one. Hurrah! The agent makes a commission (finally).

It's invariably a minimal money game for the agents, a lot of work and hustle for very little return.

How well does this describe your expectations? If not at all, then you're probably going to have to work to change the perception of the agents in your first phone calls. If this is pretty much what you want, you need to go looking for a very green, very hungry agent to do all this running around for you and not get paid for it.

I agree with Jay, however. Getting you on an MLS email list should be pretty simple. But if you want personal involvement and running around, it's going to take more than the eventual promise of a commission on a lowball offer under current market conditions.

I keep on trying to explain this to local investors in my area, and it often seems a difficult concept to get across. If you invest in multiple properties in the same area, especially properties that need a lot of work, you're going to see the same code enforcement people again and again. You want to play nice with these people. If you don't, they will make your life difficult. It's "Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full," as many times as he wants to hear it.

@Carson Wilcox

I wouldn't do stairs for $1.50 a square foot. I'd do regular oak strip flooring for that, sure. In general, I will always tend to do stairs myself because it's the kind of detail-oriented rehab work that's a no-win for contractors. Anyone working by the square foot can't economically spend enough time on it to make it look good, and anyone working by the hour just isn't capable enough to make it look good. Staircases eat money and time, and then they tend to get scratched up in moves and during the winter.

You might want to look into vinyl cap-a-treads as an alternative to carpet.

@Luke Angstadt

@Thomas S. make a very good point here. It is very common for newbies to want to do this to get a start as landlords -- hold on to their starter home as an investment and rent it out while moving to a (usually nicer) second home. The biggest problem is that you and your wife will maintain an emotional connection to the first home, which is usually not at all set up as a rental, and when you see the not-so-nice things that tenants will do to it, it will affect you. Granted, this can be a learning experience about how to harden rentals properly, but it often creates all kinds of nostalgic sentiments that can flare up into conflicts with the tenants.

The usual scenario is that the tenants move in, live as tenants do, and the newbie landlords go back in and find delicate stuff, or meaningful stuff, or stuff that they didn't even know was meaningful to them damaged or painted over or disrespected in some way, and then the newbie landlords get in this forum and moan about how tenants just don't respect their landlord's property, and they get ten other newbies commiserating and telling them that yes, yes, yes, they're right, and their tenants are bad, bad, bad...and of course this can lead to all kinds of poor decisions.