Just purchased my first rental property in RI!New in RI/MA Market

[Alyssa Merkle]

Hi Bigger Pockets community! I have been listening to podcasts and following along on forums for some time now and am ready to get into the mix of it all. I just turned 25 and I close on my first rental deal in North Providence, RI (right on the border of Lincoln, RI) July 30th. I am very excited to get started in this journey. The next goal is to use a hard money lender to do a flip to hopefully fund my next rental purchase. I live in Boston, MA, however, I am more so looking at the providence area market. 

Looking forward to making connections and learning from those who are a few steps ahead of me! 

[Anthony Thompson]

@Alyssa Merkle I'm glad to have helped :) I live in RI but have lived out of state (MA, NYC) as well. I didn't own property in RI when I lived out of state though.

I usually encounter the out of state issue at closings when one or more of the sellers are out of state (since the sale is subject to non-resident withholding).

More rarely I encounter it when I run across tenant issues and the out of state owner has failed to file the nonresident landlord form with the RI secretary of state, since the consequence is "rent for the dwelling unit abates until designation of an agent is made and landlord shall be subject to a fine of up to five hundred ($500) per violation".

Unfortunately the first time some out of state owners find out about that requirement is in eviction court when they find out that not only can't they evict, but they actually owe the tenant any rent that was collected during the tenancy before the form was filed. That's what they call "not a good day in court".

(Another "bad day in court" is if a landlord/owner doesn't follow the correct eviction process and does something stupid like turn off any utilities, remove one of the unit doors, etc. - that falls under "self-help eviction" and can be punished sternly by the courts.)

If you're going to own property in Rhode Island it's definitely worth reading through the RI Landlord Tenant Handbook (pdf), which is a more human-readable description of the RI Residential Landlord and Tenant Act.