All Forum Posts by: David Wandel

 I am meeting with an attorney this week. Someone responded to one of my mailings wanting to sell me a house. His mom died 12 years ago without a will. He has just been paying the taxes on the house. Are you mailing to AA County?

Curious to where you went to find this info online.

1. You have different levels of lead certs. If you make your house lead safe you will need another lead cert every time you have a new tenant. Lead free cert is forever. Cost to have a company come out is $250-$350 depending on who you call and which cert you are going for. Once they give you your report then you will have to either remove or encapsulate any lead paint that they find. Depending on what they find you are looking at a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands of dollars. I would not purchase the house until I had a lead inspection and knew how much it will cost to get a lead cert. Without a lead cert you will not rent to section 8 and eventually the city will fine you.

2.I would try to redeem the ground rent at a discount.

3.I have been installing roofs for over 20years in Baltimore so I am quite familiar with the city. This isn't the best area but it certainly isn't the worse.Some drug activity in the area but they move the corners they are selling off of every few months. I would be more concerned with the cost of getting the lead cert than the area assuming you are buying for cash flow.

If you really want a 2 unit there are plenty of them available in Baltimore. It would be easier to buy one already zoned than go through the aggravations to try to change the zoning with no guarantee of success. While you are going through the process are you going to leave the property empty? I would think that in order to make it a 2 unit again you will need to make repairs/modifications to the layout.

Here in Maryland Baltimore County they just tried to pass similar legislation last week. There was many unfriendly landlord provisions in there. The core part of the legislation was that a landlord would have to accept section 8 vouchers. the legislation was defeated by a vote of 6-1.

We will see more of this social engineering legislation in the future I am sure.

Keshav, welcome.I strongly encourage you to take Bill"s class. It's very in depth and covers every aspect of real estate investing. He has been in the business over 40 years. Of all the different classes and seminars that I have attended dollar for dollar his is the best.

And you should come out to the AA County Meetup this month. I am in Pasadena also if you want to reach out to me