All Forum Posts by: Karen F.

You can screen to your heart's content, and it will not make one bit of difference.  I have some good families with Sec 8, and I've had some awful ones, too.  But not a one of them would EVER have passed any stringent screening.  These are not people with good credit scores.  Sec 8 doesn't pay the deposit, but sometimes tenants have agencies that pay it for them - and tenants who are in the position of needing an agency to pay their deposit are virtually guaranteed to be trouble.  The best you can get is a family that doesn't have a history of evictions, criminal convictions, or slip and fall lawsuits against landlords (you'd be surprised how very common these are), who is able to use their earned income tax credit for the deposit.

If you had a property that was in poor cosmetic condition already, that needed to be repainted, needed new flooring, needed new kitchens and bathrooms, already had a ruined lawn/driveway, and you planned to run it into the ground renting to Sec 8 for many years, then either renovate to sell, or sell it in "as is" condition, sure.  By the time Sec 8 knocks down what they are willing to pay, by deducting all the utilities that you're not providing, and calculating "rent reasonableness" for the unit and the area, it might be a little more than you would get on the open market.  But if it's in decent condition, understand that the tenants WILL destroy it.  They will smoke in it even if they swear they don't.  They will bring in pets who will at best soil the carpets and floors and destroy the yard, and at worst bite or maul neighbors.  Their children will absolutely tear the house apart.  The little children will swing on the lower cabinet doors, breaking them off.  They will jump on the open oven door, breaking it off.  They will tear every "kick plate" off of every appliance.  They will break the handle of the refrigerator off, by swinging on it.  They will break the toilet seat off the toilet - God only knows how they do that one.  They will break the latches and knobs/handles off of the doors, punch holes in the walls and doors, bust latch plates out of the door frames.  They will burn the carpets with irons, put deep, deep scratches into any hard floors.  If you are foolish enough to include utilities, they will run heat and a/c with the windows and doors open, heat it to 80 degrees in the winter and cool it to 65 in the summer.  If they can have a washer/dryer, they will bring in the entire clan's laundry, and charge their friends to to do laundry there - the machines will run 24/7 nonstop.  And these are the GOOD ones!  The ones who pay their portion of the rent, sign their paperwork with the housing authority, allow you access to make the copious repairs that the housing inspector will require annually, don't deal drugs, don't threaten and menace their neighbors and you.  The bad ones will deal drugs, prostitute their children, rent out rooms to extra tenants, terrorize the neighbors and you, and drag their feet about returning their portion of the annual renewal paperwork to the point that the housing authority stops paying you - even though their tenants still live there!

If this sounds like a description of a cage, rather than a dwelling, understand that that is how they will use it.  Yes, there are some exceptions.  But when you're talking about a large family on Sec 8, the odds are very high that this is what you will get in there, no matter how good they looked on screening.

But hey, don't listen to the vast majority of landlords of grade A/B and even C housing who would never, ever rent to Sec 8.  And don't listen to LLs like me who do rent C housing to Sec 8 at times for over a decade now.  What do we know?

The best market for fix and flip is in a rising one.  You make your money on the increase in value of the area, as much as on the fix.  So, you got a crystal ball to predict rising values? 

The way I see it, in these low level rentals, the deposit is to cover the rent while I evict them for non-payment, if it comes to that.  I take the max deposit the law allows, and try to keep the tenant in place, assuming they pay, for as long as possible to avoid having to rehab the unit.  For that reason, I don't tend to raise rents, unless it's an inherited tenant paying way below market.  I want them to just stay and pay, so I don't have to deal with the costs of turnover.  If for some reason they do leave on good terms and the place isn't really damaged, of course I return their deposit.

We don't use an agent.  We have to sign an agreement annually, that states that the total rent on the unit is X, and that the authority is paying a certain amount, and the tenant a certain amount.  It is very clear in all the paperwork that a LL cannot charge more, and a tenant cannot offer to pay more, than the total rent on the unit.  This paperwork gets redone annually.

But, as i said, this rule is commonly flouted.  I get tenants offering to pay me more to get into a unit, and I hear of landlords getting more than the approved rate.  I have never heard of it being enforced - but any LL who agrees to it is an idiot, because then you are at the tenant's mercy.  They get mad at you for any reason, they have the power to get you kicked off of Sec 8, and as I now see, the agency might demand every penny of rent back from you!

The tables show ceilings with ALL utilities included.  You do realize that the tenants will destroy the house, don't you?  A 5 bedroom is unusually large for Sec 8.  Most households with a 5 bedroom voucher have about ten people in them.  

We have a family of 12 in a very large 6-7 bedroom unit, who have sec 8.  The local housing authority pays us well over the allowable for a 6-7 bedroom unit, because they know that it's almost impossible to find any LL who will accept a family of 12.  And we earn every penny.  They are incredibly difficult to house, so much so that I don't know if anyone else would take them, even for the whopping amount we're being paid.  Their children play with fire and knives.  They live in absolute filth.  They bring in vermin.  We deal with it because it's class C housing, so they can't destroy it too badly, no matter what they do.  And we're being paid so much for them, that we put up with it.  But your house sounds really nice.  Do you really want to have it destroyed?

Just keep giving the demand letters at the very first minute allowed.  Only communicate in writing.  Notify her in writing of all violations.  Notify her that you're not renewing at the appropriate time.  Evict at first opportunity.

Alternatively, pay her to leave.

You need to evict this tenant, and pronto.  If you're writing us here for advice on how to handle this situation, then I doubt you're in a position to run the eviction yourself.  Get a local landlord lawyer who really knows what he is doing to run the eviction for you.  Never have any further conversation with this tenant.  Any communication via email or text, and no response to anything other than notifications of a problem in the unit.

It is clearly stated in Sec 8 paperwork that it is illegal to take more from the tenant than the Sec 8 lease allows.  The Sec 8 agreement supercedes any lease you may have with the tenant.  That being said, it is extremely common in my area for tenants to pay extra, and for landlords to accept extra.  In fact, when looking at occupied multis to buy, I have frequently been shown leases with addendums clearly stating that the tenant is paying an extra, say, $200/month for the unit, above what Sec 8 is paying.  The local housing authority is not enforcing the regulation.  I won't violate it, but most landlords and tenants are.  In fact, a local realtor told me that she had never seen a multi listing with Sec 8 in place where the tenants were NOT paying above and beyond the approved rate.

The housing authority is playing hard ball with you.  Five years and you never asked for an increase?  IF you had asked for an increase, they would surely have raised the amount well above the 780 you were receiving.  The tenant bears no responsibility for having played a part in this?  They want you to pay back ALL the rent for 5 yrs?  This is ridiculous.  

You're never going to be able to rent to Sec 8 again,nor should you,  so accept that.  Do you still have any units rented to Sec 8?  If no, then you could just walk away from them, saying that the tenant perpetrated the fraud, not you.  They have no way of collecting from you.  But if you have other units rented to Sec 8, or if you ever want to rent to Sec 8 again, you're going to have to straighten this out.  Get a lawyer who's familiar with working with the housing authorities to work out a deal.  He can point out to them that the rent was never raised for 5 yrs, so the unit was being rented at well below market rates.  That you had no way of knowing that the property manager was shady.  That you're willing to return the $20/month x 5 yrs to them, to return to the tenant.  Don't bother asking for retroactive increases - they won't do it.

we have.  Assuming they leave the place in okay condition, no trash, and paid up until they left, they get the entire deposit back.  We most definitely are liberal about wear and tear on D rentals.  Fact is, most of our D rentals, the people either pay and stay (because we're really good landlords, fix anything that breaks), or they get evicted for non-payment (definitely a high risk in this type of rental).

You can't really call the '07 crash in real estate a recession.  There had been a decade long orgy of lending to buyers who were wholly unqualified, under the doctrine that "everyone should be able to get a mortgage and own their own home", even people who had bad or no credit, and who had never paid a bill or a rent payment in their lives.  That drove up property values sky high, because people were getting mortgages, and then never making a single payment on the loan.  Of course property values were going to crash.  In the town where I own multis, property values dropped by about 50%.  Finally, over ten years later, values are back up to where they had been at the previous peak.

You'd have to look at what happened to multi values in previous recessions, ones that weren't necessarily connected to huge crashes in the housing market.  Look at recessions other than the 2008 one, or the 1988 one (prior huge housing crash in Northeast, at least).