All Forum Posts by: Rob K.

If you change the toilets, I highly recommend the Gerber Viper. They cost around $100 and have a 3" flapper. It would take a sumo wrestler to clog it. I've been switching to those and haven't had any problems yet.

You said that this was a recent aquiaition. I would think back to when you first met the tenants. Did you possibly say something to one of them that rubbed them the wrong way and offended them somehow? If so, they might leave the water on all night in every faucet for payback. Maybe it's my devious mind, but that's the first thing that I thought of. You might have one rogue tenant jacking your bill.

There shouldn't be standing water under the house. Did you find where it's coming from? Usually, there is some leak in the bathroom. I would have your worker in the crawl space under the bathroom and flush the toilet and run the sink and tub to check for leaks before installing a sump pump.

I notice in my area that many apartment complexes include heat in the rent. Probably because they have huge boilers instead of individual furnaces. By having electric stoves, they can have the tenants just pay an electric bill and not have seperate gas meters for each apartment.

In my rentals (all single family homes), I prefer gas stoves over electric. Most people prefer to cook with gas. Also in class C rentals, many tenants will let their gas be turned off except in the extreme cold. Having the stove, water heater, and dryer all gas encourages them to keep the gas on.

I use Foremost also. One thing that I noticed with Allstate is that their maximum liability coverage is only $500,000. In my opinion, that is not enough.

 Do the sex offenders still liver there? If not, their addresses should be updated on the sex offender site. If they move and don't change their address, that should be a crime and you can report them. 

Yes. Check out this link:

Operating agreement for single member LLC

The operating agreement states how the LLC is run. When I got a commercial loan for my single member LLC, the bank wanted the operating agreement.

As far as liability, talk to your insurance agent about getting more. I would rather have a house in my personal name with a million liability coverage than have the same house in an LLC with only half a million.

@David Roberts 

You need an operating agreement for each LLC. I agree with others that having each property in it's own LLC is overkill. I talked to my lawyer about this a while ago. He said insurance is your best defense. He also told me that he was involved in a lawsuit where the landlord had no smoke detectors, house burned down, and children died. When it was all said and done, the family settled for the $1 million insurance payout. They wanted their cash and didn't want to wait years to try and get more.

In Michigan, slip and fall lawsuits don't exist. As long as you run your business properly, a frivolous lawsuit will be the least of your problems.

You might also want to read this thread:

LLC

Read Keith Barton's post from November 25, 2011 on page 2. It's very interesting the way he lays out different scenarios.

I wouldn't recommend skipping maternity care. There's a lot that can go wrong. We thought about it as there was a hospital an hour away that was advertising that they deliver babies for $1,000. My concern was if we didn't get there in time or there were complications, it could end up costing a fortune.

A lot of people are tempted to go without insurance, but it can bankrupt you. My friend had open heart surgery at age 31 and the bill came to $800K. My next door neighbor is only 34 and had a heart attack this past summer. He had employer health insurance, but was still $8,000 out of pocket.