All Forum Posts by: James Free

This legislative session introduced a lot of changes besides this one. All together, things are far worse than this thread makes them appear, and honestly, I don't think I could summarize all of the impacts if I tried. Procedural errors will now be catastrophically expensive.

What's going to happen is that many landlords and nearly all tenants won't know about the changes, so only a few landlords will get burned at first, and that amount will grow over time. The law also established a slush fund for "legal services for tenants", meaning that we can be sued with our own tax dollars. In practice, the landlording equivalent of "ambulance chasers" will proactively market to renters, offering to sue their landlords over trivialties so that they can collect this funding and profit.

Get out of Colorado. You could easily be one of the lucky ones whose tenants obliviously continue life as before, but the risk is terrible.

These are extremely high-risk properties, all the more so to somebody new, which I presume you are since you're asking the question.

Moreover, asking about financing for such small amounts implies that you have little in terms of cash reserves, which is a bad, bad place to be in when buying high-risk properties.

I strongly discourage you from proceeding with your plan. Real Estate makes a lot of people rich, but not like this.

Google the foreclosure implications of being a debt-holder in second position, and you'll find a bunch of articles explaining that if the house sells for less than what is owed, the person in second position gets screwed. What I want to know is, what happens if the house sells for MORE than is owed, and there are two debt-holders.

Suppose there's a first mortgage balance of $100k and a second mortgage balance of $30k, and the house sells in foreclosure for $180k. How is that $180k distributed?

By not paying everything until you're satisfied.

And in general, I'd say you're not too much of a perfectionist based on what you've described here.

Conveniently, the fines are less than an attorney will cost, so it makes little sense to do anything other than submit to this extortion. 

And I do have PM, not that I'm pleased with their handling of this.

General Scenario: 

1. Tenant stops paying rent (during eviction moratorium)

2. Tenant damages property

3. Tenant reports damage to city's Neighborhood Services Department; complains that owner needs to fix it

4. Tenant won't allow repair people into the unit

5. City fines landlord for not fixing damage reported in #3

Why is it so easy/normal to get fined for tenant-caused issues? What recourse does a landlord have here? Is there a general process for appealing the fine that doesn't involve more legal fees than benefits?

For over a decade, cash-out refinances have been a great way to tap the equity in rental properties without selling them. These have generally been easy to do in part because interest rates kept getting lower, so there was benefit to refinancing even if you didn't want cash out.

As interest rates creep up, the benefits of using HELOCs rather than refinances to tap new equity will grow, because investors won't want to increase the interest rates on their existing debt. This will make it more important to be able to find lenders who will do HELOCs on investment property. A few lenders are commonly mentioned in these forums as good HELOC lenders, but all of them require that you own no more than four properties total. Has anyone found a lender that doesn't have that restriction?

No, @Michael Plante, I am not sending them applications. As I said in my initial post, they are paying to apply via a popular online service.

@Colleen F.'s explanation makes some sense, though it's still strange for them to phrase their response as I quoted in this thread title rather than simply saying they're not interested.

One of the hallmarks of the COVID era has been rampant unemployment abuse, whereby employers find that large numbers of people apply for jobs even on the other side of the country and don't respond to callbacks because their only real reason for applying is to continue receiving unemployment insurance.

Is there something similar for tenants?

I ask because one of my rentals is coming vacant and since I advertised it for rent on a popular online platform, people have been submitting applications (which costs money!) and then declining when I ask if they want to actually see the property. This seems like foolish behavior and would only make sense to me if there was some sort of government incentive to do it.

Can anyone explain these applicants?

And no, I'm not leasing to any of them; I have better candidates, so no need to derail the thread with advice.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/r...

It's not necessarily a positive mention, but there it is:

Local buyers bid against one another as well as against investors who now comprise about a fifth of annual home sales nationally. Online platforms such as BiggerPockets and Fundrise make it easier for out-of-town investors to buy real estate in smaller cities across the U.S., said John Burns of California-based John Burns Real Estate Consulting.

Often, Mr. Burns said, “the cash flows are better in the Tulsas and Allentowns of the world” for those seeking to rent out properties. In the fourth quarter of 2020, nearly a fifth of homes sold in the Allentown area were bought by investors, according to Mr. Burns’s data.