All Forum Posts by: Richard C.

 Probably about $400-$500 for the class.  

$100 application fee.

$12 recovery fund fee.

$40 fingerprinting fee.

 Yeah, absolutely!  Just do it!  Here, hold my beer...

Patricia, I strongly suggest you contact Brian Gibbons, the BP resident expert on lease-options, and ask him whether there is a deal here.

The Sumner County Association of Realtors offers real estate licensing classes at its location on Executive Park Drive in Hendersonville.

That would be a really excellent place to start.

Here is the best way to think of a service animal, if you want to keep out of trouble:

Not only is a service animal not a "pet", but it is not even an animal.  It is a piece of medical equipment.

Don't be looking to pet clauses in your lease, or condo association bans on animals of certain sizes, or insurance company limitations on animals.

The service animal is not, for the purposes of this sort of discussion, an animal.  It is a piece of equipment necessary for the health of the prospective tenant.

Does that mean they must always be allowed?  Not under the ADA, no.  The reasonable accommodation language several posters have mentioned is real.  But try thinking of the service animal in the same way as you might think of a wheelchair.  And if you don't think you could get away with banning that wheelchair, then don't trying banning the service animal.

Will people abuse this?  Yep, they sure will.  Will they win regardless?  Yep, they sure will.  Does this mean that within a few years, pet restrictions will essentially disappear from leases, because there will be this loophole that makes them effectively unenforceable?  In my opinion, yes.

Prepare to deal with this new world.

It is actually quite common to ask the seller to pay the closing costs in exchange for a higher sale price.  Could be asking price, could even be above asking price.

Effectively what you would be doing is rolling the closing costs into the mortgage.

Obviously, this approach requires that the property appraise out at the higher price.

 Perfect!

Honestly, I am wonder why on earth you would WANT to close on this house.  You're going to lose your shirt.

Yeah, you are being paranoid.

I can imagine many, many scenarios where a person might need to "move right away" in the sense that they need to lock down where exactly they will be living, but not need to actually physically move for a few weeks.

The school aspect is one of them.  Perhaps he needed a signed lease on an apartment in order to get his child registered for the coming year, but does not actually feel the need to occupy it until the school year actually begins?

In any case, your part of the deal is to provide the premises as agreed, and to repair and maintain it as required.  His part of the deal is to follow the lease provisions, pay the rent, and exercise reasonable care toward the property.

This other stuff is, frankly, none of your business.

 Driving neighborhoods to get a feel for them can be difficult for people from other regions of the country, as it sounds like you have realized.  A 150-year-old wood frame house that would be a teardown in most of the South or a $40k class C rental in the Midwest might be a very desirable house worth hundreds of thousands.  Also, most of New England grew pretty organically, and not in a planned way.  So it is not at all unusual to find a million dollar house a couple hundred yards down the same road as a rotting trailer.  There aren't a lot of large planned sudivisions.

I've never attended a REIA meeting, so I have no idea of their value.

Zillow's accuracy issues are well known, but because of low sales volume in rural NH, I think they may be especially bad here.  I routinely see values off by 50%, and rent "zestimates" wrong by 25%.  So be careful there.

Reasonably modern purpose-built fourplexes like you see in much of the country are very rare.  Wood triple deckers are common in Manchester, slightly less so in Nashua and other towns.

The biggest variable in values, in my experience, is the quality of the school district.  This can vary wildly in neighboring towns that look superficially similar.

A good general rule of thumb in old mill towns in NH or Central Mass (which is where I grew up, there and Boston.)  There is usually a river.  That is where the mills (and jobs) were.  Worker housing was down near the river, close to the work but also the heat and general unpleasantness.  Higher classes lived on the surrounding hills, since they didn't have to walk to work and that way they caught the breezes.  If you're in a mill town in New England and want to find the nicer neighborhoods, walk uphill.

If I were looking for a multi in NH now (which I am not) and did not want to deal with Manchester, I would be looking hard in Milford, the town immediately to Nashua's west.  Solid demographics, good but not outstanding school system, decent value available.  Get an agent there, and start reading the listings, and I think you may find what you are looking for.

Maybe a slightly wider net, but still close, if that makes sense.

In my case, for example, my rentals are all within a 15 minute radius of each other.  But the center of that area is about 40 minutes from my actual house.  I have rental houses in the area where I spent most of my younger adult years, the Monadnock region of New Hampshire.  So I am very familiar and comfortable with it.

Quite recently, I moved about 20 miles east, to a somewhat more upscale town that is the suburb of the state's largest "city."  I did that mostly because of convenience for my wife and proximity to the airport.

So I'm invested in an area I know well (and intend to retire to, actually) and that is even after my move close enough to visit very frequently.