All Forum Posts by: Gwen Fyfe

I mean, I'm an auditor and an accountant. To me, this is a pretty clear conflict of interest. But, YMMV, I guess. 

Anyway... I think most people are pretty unlikely to post anything but good feedback about a business in a forum where the business owner is a mod, especially when they get this type of reaction. So the discussion continues over beers and in private. Which is a shame for anyone looking for information here.

I'm pretty skeptical of Holton Wise, as I said a couple of months ago. An attitude of "if you criticize me it's totally fine for me to publicly post details of your investment" definitely puts the cherry on it. (Although I'm mostly on the East side so it's not too likely anyway.)

But, I believe that individual salespeople at HW have a lot of leeway to run their stuff the way they want to, which is great. I know I've talked with one or two when looking at deals for out of state investors, and those employees have been very responsive.

So it goes straight to them? If you or your staff have a post flagged, it doesn't come to you for moderation at all, right?

James, if someone reports your posts on this forum because they think you are being inappropriate, who does it go to? If someone reports your staff's posts on this forum, who does it go to? 

I guess it's probably my sense of decency and respect for customer privacy.

I feel like James being a mod on here is starting to be a conflict of interest. I mean, if a post of his gets flagged who does it go to? What about his staff's posts? And how openly and honestly can people share their experiences of his company if he shows up with the Moderator tag to post a bunch of photos of the poster's property when there's criticism?

What the hell? James, can I assume you didn't get Brandon's permission to post details and photographs of his property?

One from a couple months ago... not exactly dumb, I felt for the lady, but pretty hilarious since everyone's okay.

My tenant Mary asked me to rekey the locks and I agreed, but didn't have time to do it myself, so I sent a locksmith over and figured I'd pick up my copy of the keys sometime that week. (Never going to do that again.) That night, I get my first 3 AM call from the tenant on the other half of the duplex. Mary's smoke alarm is going off, all her lights are on, her car is in the drive, but my other tenant is banging on the door and Mary isn't responding. Oh my god. I call the fire department to meet me there, and drive over freaking out. ("Oh my god, Mary is dead, I have a dead tenant, oh my god, we're going to have to break in, the fire department is going to shoot her rottweiler, I'm going to be the slumlord all over the news in my town, oh my god I hope Mary is okay, I'm going to have to explain this to her father the pastor...")

We get there, the fire department breaks in the door because I don't have the new keys yet. Mary was asleep upstairs. She's okay and her dog is okay. Thank God. She had taken some painkillers for a chronic illness, then put spaghetti on to boil and passed out. All the water boiled off, filled the place with smoke. Poor girl woke up to chaos and cops in her bedroom. Oi vey. She is so embarrassed, a little scared, and so apologetic. She will absolutely get the door replaced herself, etc., etc. I'm just happy she's alive.

But when I'm on the way out, she picks up the spaghetti wrapper from the counter and says "And that was a whole brand new pack of spaghetti!" and finally breaks down in tears.

Landlording could be a sitcom.

I asked the inspector about this one. Apparently their logic is that if tenants don't have an outlet on both sides of their sink, they'll run electrical cords over the sink.

Stupid. None of my tenants are doing that. I bet they saw one person doing it once and made a code out of it. 

Two outlets in a big kitchen or bathroom is convenient, fine, but these are efficiency units where the counter space is maybe three feet total in the kitchen. It would be hilarious if it weren't costing me money.

I know there are a few people here who manage rentals in Bedford, right outside Cleveland.

I've been getting my inspections done, and boy are they nitpicky. It's important to me to keep properties in good condition for my tenants, and some of the repairs the city is asking for are reasonable. (Although many are minor cosmetic damage caused by tenants which I normally wouldn't do anything with until the tenants move. Meh.) But some of them are just nuts. I need to install a GFCI outlet on both sides of every sink (not replace a normal outlet with a GFCI one, put in entirely new outlets so every sink has two), install another 2-3 smoke detectors per property, repaint all internal molding/trim so that it matches, replace a garage door panel that has a 1 cm dent, and so on. Really?! 

I have more properties coming up to be inspected so I took a look at the city website. I noticed that on the request form, you can say that you do not consent to an inspection. If you do this, they'll either get a warrant (which seems like a lot of trouble and expense for them) or just do a general exterior inspection.

Has anyone done this? How does it play out? Because of some of the changes that are being requested by the city, I think that the previous owners of the properties must have not allowed internal inspections. But I don't want to get into an adversarial relationship with the city.

Half a day is a pretty big time commitment, but I'd be glad to grab a coffee and talk about Believeland with you. There's a lot of fun stuff going on over here.