All Forum Posts by: Bob H.

I am considering buying an old house in Colorado that has undergone methamphetamine remediation. If I bought it, I would rehab it and use it as a vacation home and rental.

It seems that some people don't trust remediation efforts to fully remove health hazards -- even if the remediation procedures follow state law. Aside from health threats, there also is the economic danger that a stigma of previous meth activity would make the property harder to rent or sell.

If you have experience with such a property or have expertise in remediation, I'd like to hear your thoughts. Would you move into a house that had meth remediation?

I took down some paneling like that years ago. I gave some to our painter and gave away more to somebody on craigslist. Try posting on craigslist to see if you can get someone who wants the paneling and is willing to remove it free. You'll still need to fill nail holes and texture the ceiling and walls, but it would be a start.

Try Build-a-Sign.

In taking licensing courses in California and Texas, I have found most of the educational materials to be of low quality. The people taking the courses are a captive audience. They need to take the courses to satisfy state requirements that are often irrelevant and do not address much of what students really need to know about the real estate business. 

The vendor of a California course once paid me to submit detailed comments on errors in the book for a course I took. More recently, in Texas I took the Kaplan courses on Promulgated Contract Forms, Law of Agency and Contracts.

The textbook for the Promulgated Contract Forms course had some of the worst writing I've seen. The sample questions and answers have errors, and questions midway through the book sometimes relate to material presented later. Some questions are on topics not even mentioned in the book.

The book on Law of Agency was extremely repetitive and could have covered the subject in half its length. The sample test materials were full of errors.

For the Contracts course, the book had obviously been written for all states and was full of generalities. It had been customized for Texas in a haphazard way and did not adequately cover the broad topic of contracts. The sample test materials were poorly worded and had a substantial number of errors.

I can't recommend any other vendor of Texas courses, but that was my experience with these Kaplan courses in late 2013 and early 2014. 

Definitely look at Nolo.

It's the manager's fault if no move-in and move-out inspections were done. Check your management contract. You may need an attorney.

@Ben Leybovich, consider this possibility, which occurred at my sister's house in the St. Louis area: Water backed up into the basement from a floor drain connected to the sanitary sewer system, not the storm drain system. Heavy rain should not overwhelm the sanitary sewer system; rain is not even supposed to be in that system. Nevertheless, flooding can occur when an old system is not maintained well by the utility. Old sanitary sewers develop cracks that accept rainwater when the ground is saturated, and of course the sanitary sewers are not designed for the large volume that a storm produces.

You may have a claim against the sewer utility for damage caused by water coming out of your floor drain. The claim could include the cost of dealing with contamination caused by sanitary sewage coming into contact with walls and floors in the basement. The utility may even offer you a cleaning service.

Water coming into the basement sounds more like a grading problem than a problem with overflowing gutters. Even if the gutters and downspouts are not doing their job, water should drain away from the house.

You can buy products that block leaves from entering gutters while allowing water in.

Yet another option: Move to the Austin area, where it bugs me quite a bit that most houses have few gutters. The builders typically install gutters only near doorways and porches. 

I'd say the main purpose of a home warranty is to keep the buyer from complaining to a Realtor after buying a house that experiences a problem. That's why the Realtors have built home warranties into the sales process.

I don't disagree with compensating your tenant for the loss of AC, but let's not claim this is a safety issue. I grew up in a St. Louis suburb when most of homes did not have air-conditioning. Most of them added it later. Then it was a nice luxury, but people were not dying for lack of air-conditioning. 

So, yeah, it was hot. It's hot in a lot of places. People lived without air-conditioning for thousands of years. People can turn on fans. It's a safety issue only for people who like to be victims.

You should look into the utilities some more. If you get a landlord account, you should not have to pay setup fees repeatedly. In my area the electric utility imposes exorbitant charges for a new account, but I have to pay only for usage for a few days between tenants. The gas company charges $19 when services changes from the old tenant to my landlord account and then another $19 when service goes to the new tenant. The municipal water utility requires a $100 deposit on the landlord account but also charges only for usage during the time between tenants.

Be sure the air-conditioning is off when no one is living there, and turn down or turn off the water heater if the vacancy is more than a few days.