All Forum Posts by: Jerome Kaidor

Hello,

   As an active buy&hold landlord type, I often have to run criminal checks on people.  I have been using SentryLink.  They do a national level search for about $20.  Problem though.  It's happened twice.  I had people apply who had felonies.  They disclosed on their application and in the phone interview.  Ran Sentrylink - no hit.  Yet I know these people had felonies, and I know that they were adults when they did it.

   I used to use Intelius, but it's expensive.  Forty bucks for the same search.  And I don't know if it's any better.  I was doing statewide searches with them, but statewide isn't very good IMHO.  People are too mobile.

   Anybody know a good, accurate criminal search provider?

                  - Jerry Kaidor

Interestingly, she was an ideal tenant for many years.  Paid the rent like a clock, you hardly knew she was there.  Then about three months ago, she just stopped paying.  We waited a month - because she was *such* a good tenant, and then went and asked what was the problem, and would she like a payment plan?  She just said "You'll have to file".  Didn't leave us much choice.

I suspect drugs.

Here's the preliminary list of what the tenant did:

* She pulled all the electrical sockets out of the walls and CUT THE WIRES - very big deal, because it's knob & tube.

* She removed the light fixtures

* She stole the door locks

* She broke ceramic tiles in the floor

* She set fires in the kitchen and bathroom.

* She poured something sticky & smelly into the carpet

* She damaged the water heater

* She broke the pipes coming out the wall for the shower and bathroom vanity

* She stole the smoke & CO detectors

* She made holes in the walls and ceilings.

* She slashed the tires on my maintenance man's truck ( there was a witness )

Hello,

    We're having a tough eviction.  The lady filed an extremely detailed answer - all bogus.  We prevailed in court.  Lockout is this morning.  Since the court dates, she has been doing something with the water in her apartment to cause leaks into the apartments downstairs.  Last night, she caused a flood that even got water to the floor below that ( she's on the third floor ).  Staff had to turn off the water for the whole building at 3:00 this morning.

  I am so tired of this kind of crap.  I want to file criminal charges against this person, for vandalism.  Has anybody had any luck doing that?  The last time I called the PD for something a tenant did ( that person stole the refrigerator when she moved out ), they said it was a civil landlord/tenant matter to be handled through the security deposit.  Yeah, right.  PD just didn't want to do the work.

I once built a 800-foot addition behind my house.  There was a patio.  That sucker was a foot and a half thick.  Seems the prior owner had a friend in the concrete business.  Said friend would give him concrete left over from jobs.

   We picked half-heartedly at that stuff with our rental demo hammer.  It wasn't going anywhere without spending big bucks.  So we found an alternative.  If we built the entire floor out of P.T.  they would let us have - essentially no crawl space.  So that's what we did. We just demoed a bit of that mountain of concrete a the edges for the new perimeter foundation.

Hello all,

   I just did a casual web search for some tax info, and found some fairly horrifying stuff here:

http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/repairs-vs-...

  Basically, the IRS is going to get a LOT fussier about repair and maintenance.  They don't want you to expense it, they want you to depreciate it.  For 27.5 years, please.

Is it Betterment, Adaptation or Restoration?  Depreciate it, please.

Most repair reasonably counts as "Restoration" :(.

Maybe you don't have to, if it's a really small thing.   Or do you?  The definition of "really small thing" is also changing.  The IRS will now divide our properties into "UOP"s ( Units of Property ).  For example, the HVAC stuff is one Unit of Property.  Even if a repair is a piddly little thing related to the entire property, you will still have to depreciate it if it's a significant part of its respective UOP.

  GAAK! 

This won't mean much to the "fix n' flip" folks, because all this stuff will just become part of their basis anyway.   But to us stick-in-the-mud buy-and-hold landlords, it's a VERY big deal.  We typically operate on pencil-thin margins.    

Not only that, but we will have to expend significant effort ( time is money, remember? ) keeping track of this crap.  And at tax time, the more depreciation schedules you have,

the more money your tax service ( or CPA ) makes.

GAAK!

                        - Jerry Kaidor

Hello,

   I'm looking for my third pest control company ( or is it the fourth? ) for my complex in the California Central Valley ( land O'Bugs ).  I have always used professional pest control companies, but find the following problems with them:

   * It depends on the technician.  If you have a good technician, you have a good company.     If not, not.

* Your technician may start out strong, but over time ( and this seems to happen EVERY time ) they come to think they own you.  They start diluting the (expensive) chemicals, and tenants complain that the bugs are out of control.  Or they use the wrong chemicals - same result.

  I have preferred to use companies for this - rather than training my staff - because of the liability.  What if a tenant gets some vague illness and imagines that it's my fault?

  On the other hand, imaginary pest control carries a liability also.  Tenant takes her baby to the emergency room, where they fish a cockroach out of the child's ear....

   If we do it ourselves, we can research and buy the very best and most appropriate chemicals.  The labor money spent stays with my employees and keeps them happy ( they like to make money ) instead of keeping the pest control operator's employees happy.  On-site staff has incentive to do it right, because they live there.

  I believe it is legal to do this on your own property, as long as you don't offer service to anyone else.

 *** Nope, you can't have that.  Maybe in other states, not in California.  That would be discrimination against children.   And I really think those laws are Federal.  Stupid, I know.  

Of course, our main concern is the safety of the child.  I have two one-year-old babies, my whole life revolves around them.   And I lost an adult son two years ago.  There is no more fearsome loss than the loss of a child.

I was at a landlording seminar, they went into great detail about how you can't have a rule specific to persons of a certain age.  You can only have rules against specific behaviors.  So - we have rules - "No bicycling or ball playing in the parking lot" - that go for persons of all ages.

Hello all,

   I just got a call from the manager of my 52-unit complex.  A tenant has a 3 y/o child who has been wandering the complex unattended.    The child has been turning off the main water for one of the buildings.  Also, he has been gone into our main parking lot!   The tenant claims that their 11 y/o daughter was supervising the baby.

   What sort of notice can I give these people?  Per federal Fair Housing guidelines, you cannot have rules that are different for children than for adults - that would be discrimination.

   About all I can think of is a "waste & nuisance" 3day for turning the water off.

Hello,

   For the first time in many years, I had to pay some income tax.  This prompted me to read the return in detail - whereas in the past, I just filed it.   I have a 20 unit property that I bought some years ago in an exchange for a fourplex.  Seemed like a neat deal at the time - sell four, buy twenty!  Unfortunately, the deal really was not that good - the market crashed, and this 20-plex has been eating my lunch every month for the past 6 years.

   One detail that struck me in the Schedule E was the depreciation.  Even though I paid over a million dollars for this turkey, I'm only getting about a grand a month in depreciation. WTF?

   The dirty secret - that is only hinted at in glowing descriptions of the 1031 process - is that when you exchange, your basis will be that of your original purchase price of the OLD property.  So you only get depreciation at that rate.   There are a few adjustments, having to do with closing costs and recapture of depreciation, but that's basically it.

  So when you analyze your new deal, make sure to take account of the fact that your depreciation will not change - much.  For a long term buy&hold deal, depreciation can be a big part of the package.  It still might be a good deal, but you do need to take the basis & depreciation into account.

  A more serious effect (for me) is that if the replacement property decreases in value, you can't sell it cheap without incurring a - possibly mind-boggling - tax liability.