All Forum Posts by: Jim K.

@Moncy Samuel

Post a picture of the range with the cabinets overhanging it. It's going to be easy enough to confirm the tenant's story.

Probably the easiest way is going to be to pull the cabinets and replace them. Depending on the damage, you might get away with redoing the cabinets or replacing a door or two. Depending on the cabinets, this could get pricey.

Take a good look at the lease, have a conversation with your real estate lawyer. If you don't have one, get a good local real estate lawyer. Start eviction proceedings if you and the lawyer agree that you have grounds to do so.

@Chris Pasternak

http://www.wtae.com/article/one-person-hurt-in-rep...

A woman got shot in the leg just outside St. Gregory, the church I got married at, and then the next day someone just executed this poor guy right off Frick Park, what, four blocks down the hill from there? No leads, no suspects, no one saw anything, no one knows anything.

For once, I'm going to do the smart thing for myself on Bigger Pockets.

Tyler, the future for Pittsburgh is incredibly bright. The city is exploding with possibilities and potential. You should buy now, and buy as much as you can. Tomorrow, the prices all over the city will be out of reach, climbing into the stratosphere. We're seeing major major tech players move in and take up shop in the bleeding edges of urban chic all over the area, turning the city into a major new tech hub. With them have come incredible, paradigm-changing restaurants, a patronage of the arts of a scale unseen since the Gilded Age, a proliteration of changes remaking the city on the most basic levels. This is not your father's Pittsburgh, it's not even your elder brother's Pittsburgh. It's a Pittsburgh born anew ever minute, ever innovating, ever changing, ever different and better.

Of all the areas of the city projected to grow, grow, grow, you need to look at the Munhall-Homestead area across the river. Between you and me, I've never seen such a thing happen. Homestead is undergoing more than a renaissance, it's as if God Himself has decided to renew the Covenant in that area. But act now, because these savings won't last long! Buy anything at all that you can find on the market, because a tsunami of change is coming to the area.

@PJ Singh

OK, this is what's going on. You have a greenboard shower. The backerboards behind the tiles are rotted out because they are made of moisture-resistant drywall that should never have been used in a shower stall, but was, quite widely, back in the day. I'll bet that if you push the lower walls, down near the shower pan, you'll feel more than a bit of give in the whole wall.

The will keep coming back. It's migrating from behind the tile and into the shower. Yes, the ridiculous excuse for a caulk job helped, yes, the extra water from the boyfriend helped, but it would have happened sooner or later. Greenboard doesn't last.

What you need to do is redo the shower. It will continue to fall apart if you do not. Sooner or later, tile will start coming off the wall, and you're going to see a flaking mess behind the tiles.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, PJ. Get the best tile guy you can find in there for an estimate and he'll most likely tell you the same thing. If he doesn't, listen to him, not to me. But it looks like a standard rotted-out greenboard shower.

Until you get the shower redone, I suggest you use the same cleanup method the EPA recommends. Bleach, 1 cup to 1 gallon of water. And yes, tell the tenants to run the ventilation fan during a shower, and recaulk using a good thick bead of 100% silicone sealant...but sadly, I think the problem is that the greenboard behind the tile is rotting out.

@Caleb Heimsoth

I fully agree with you, then.

@Derrick E.

Blessed are we who live in the land of s---shacks, I always say. The situation up here in the Paris of Appalachia isn't exactly the same. But it's close enough when it comes to low-cost rentals.

Go big or go home, Brandon.

@Ryan Greenspan

I'm not a lawyer in Texas or anywhere else but I would put a lot of money down on the legal notion that it does NOT grant you permission to enter and search the property. If you can see or smell or hear something from the front door, that's a different issue

@Mark Davis

If you don't pay your mortgage on your home, officers of the bank accompanied by brawny bank thugs can't come and take your home away from you, as many believe.

If you don't pay taxes on your home, the city doesn't send specially designated tax police out to your house  to throw you out and put a lock on the door.

What happens instead, in most places is that you go through a legal process called a "foreclosure."

In the case of a mortgage, the bank forecloses on the house that guaranteed the mortgage. In most places, or at least traditionally, they go to the county court system and they present evidence that the mortgage has not been paid. With enough time and no action take on the property, a judge rules that the property can be sold at a foreclosure auction to pay off the mortgage plus cost and taxes, with the remainder being given to the former owner (who, after the auction, has no house). Traditionally, these auctions are run by the county sheriff, and so they are called sheriff's sales.

Pretty much the same thing happens when you don't pay property taxes. The entity that you didn't pay the taxes to goes to the county court system, talks to the judge, and the judge makes a ruling that the property can be sold at a foreclosure auction to recoup the taxes that caused the foreclosure, with the remainder given to the former owner of the house (who now has no house, of course). It's traditionally the same sheriff and the same auctions.

So the houses being sold at sheriff sales are the ones that the owners didn't pay their mortgage on and the houses that they owners didn't pay their taxes on.

Now, this is what actually happens at a traditional sheriff's sale.

A bunch of people sit in a courtroom and a sheriff's deputy sits at a desk in front of them. There are four kinds of people in the audience. Experienced real estate investors, lawyers for the banks and the counties/municipalities/entities that didn't get paid their taxes, lookie-lookies, and quite a few owners of the properties being auctioned trying to convince the lawyers not to foreclose on their houses. 

The very ugliest part of a sheriff sale is seeing a former owner,  half-mad with the overwhelming psychological trauma of losing their home, trying to beg a bank's lawyer to just give them another chance to pay, or disrupting the proceedings to protest the house being brought to auction.

The investors hate the lookie-lookies. The lawyers hate the lookie-lookies. The former owners hate the lookie-lookies. The lookie-lookies still show up. You can spot the worst lookie-lookies because when the proceedings are disrupted for any reason, they always lean forward eagerly and try to ask around. When they see a man or woman in ragged clothing begging not to have their home sold from under them, they tend to make cheap little moral judgments and smile at each other. Sometimes, they titter at the gauche antics of the former homeowner. Sometimes, you can hear them say things aloud like, "Oh well, they should have paid on time, it is what it is!" This is when I wish the lookie-lookies dead and I am glad they search us for weapons at the courthouse entrance.

The sheriff runs the auction. Each property is introduced for sale. If it is a mortgage foreclosure property, typically the bank that brought the property to foreclosure ends up with the property. Bidding against the bank is often a poor idea.

On tax sales, things get a bit weird. Sometimes, the amount of the tax that the property owner was supposed to have paid and didn't is incredibly high because the taxes haven't been paid for years, and no one would ever want to buy the property at that price. The property is exposed for auction once, and then the lawyers who brought the property go back to the judge and insist that they'll never be able to sell it for the amount of the back taxes. The county judge makes a ruling that all taxes and costs and fees should be dismissed and the bidding should start at a very low amount, just to get the bidding going. The property is sold "free and clear" of all debts  that are secured by its value (or property liens). The title is clean.

That's where you hear about people buying expensive properties for trivial amounts like $5000, when these properties are obviously worth much more.

It's also where you hear about the not-so-lucky buyers walking into the property and finding the former owner's rat-gnawed corpse rotting on a couch in the living room.

@PJ Singh

Lotsa pictures, please, and make sure you include a couple wide-angles of the base. I am a home improvement contractor in Pennsylvania with experience building showers like these. There's one specific reason this might be happening that I suspect most -- the way the shower pan was installed/built. This whole, "water is getting behind the tiles and seeping to the bottom" stuff is baloney. What's much more likely according to what you've described is that water is getting into the bottom of the backerboard used behind the tile from the shower pan and migrating up the wall through capillary action. I'll likely be able to tell from pictures.

There's no leak issue. The paint would be obviously peeling underneath the shower pan. It wouldn't take a plumber, your handyman would have seen it. This ain't about the boyfriend, either. A properly installed walk-in shower will easily outlast the life of a residential property with minimal maintenance.

Get the pictures and there's a high probability I'll have a good answer for you. Good luck!

@Caleb Heimsoth

There are two problems with having no liability insurance on a rental property: it's very hard to borrow money on the property without insurance on it and when you get sued for something that happened on the property, the lawyer does not have a policy to go after and will have to go after all your combined assets.

A lot of inexperienced rental owners believe that as long as they have the property in an LLC, they've kept themselves safe, because that's what a lot of salesmen tell them, a whole lot of baloney about not "piercing the corporate veil." It sounds good when the salesmen push it over the phone, but believe you me, there's no judge in American who won't hesitate to rule against you if you as a landlord obviously caused the tenant some form of injury and the LLC is obviously just there to confuse the issue of who owns the property and is liable for any overlooked maintenance that caused the tenant's broken leg, etc.

An LLC is not an insurance policy. If you have a policy on the property, and the lawyer has an obvious target, the low-hanging fruit is to go after the policy's liability limits. It's hard for a lawyer to argue to a judge and harder for a ruling to stand on appeal that insurance policy limits shouldn't apply to a particular case. If you don't have an insurance policy, the lawyer has to go after something, and will therefore try to justify going after a judgment on you and all your assets. This opens you up to very expensive risk, because in order to fight this kind of lawsuit, well, the tenant's lawyer is working on a contingency, while you have to pay your own lawyers. A policy fight can be settled in minutes, a judgment against you could strip your of other assets. I am not a lawyer and this is only my understanding of it from a rental property investor's standpoint.

To sum up, our lawyer's advice was very simple, and also echoed by our CPA. They are both specialists in working with rental property owners. "Do whatever you have to do, pay whatever you have to pay, to get liability insurance on a rental property."