All Forum Posts by: Kathleen Brady

Thanks for the replies. My handyman got a yard maintenance company to come and do the cleanup and turn the dirt. Seems to have worked. Pavan Sandhu, no plans at the momenty for an ADU because there are already 2 separate units. Maybe at some point in the future but at the moment, I've got my hands full. :)

Hi! Wondering if anyone can give me insight into seller disclosure requirements?  More specifically, should a seller have been required to disclose that the yard was full of hazardous materials? I bought a 2 family rental in Sacramento and turns out the yard is full of hazardous debris including lots of syringes and broken glass right under the topsoil. Since the seller did minor landscaping throughout the entire property, I can't help but assume they knew this was there. Do I have any recourse?

Hi. I recently purchased a rental in Sacramento with a big yard (about 6000 sq ft). Turns out the yard has a lot of broken glass (big and small pieces) and other dangerous small bits of garbage in the soil. Any recommendations for an affordable gardener/landscaper who could do a clean-up to make it safe for the tenant's children? I'm not even sure how something like this gets cleaned up? One suggestion was that the soil will have to be sifted (that sounds like a crazy amount of work), another was to have the soil turned over and another was to get new soil (this would be a prohibitive amount of soil. Any suggestions?

Thank you all for posting. I raised the rent. There are so few rentals in the area that I had a hard time finding comps. The rent raise made a few people lose interest but still a lot of applicants. 

@Joe Bertolino  wow! Yes that is the experience I’m having. A massive flood of applicants, many of who seemed desperate to find housing. 

Another thing happened that I wasn’t expecting. Someone copied my listing within hours of me posting it and tried to get a scam going. Someone showed up to look at the houses and started talking about my Facebook marketplace rental posting. But I didn’t post on Facebook marketplace. They showed it to me and sure enough, someone had taken my ad from Zillow, copied and pasted it (with a rent reduction!). I assume they are trying to collect deposits. I got them to take it down but geez!

Hi, I’m about to rent out a duplex I just purchased in Sacramento and I’m wondering what are people seeing with rent prices. I put them at what seems to be a little more than mid range market rent but the response I got is through the roof. Dozens and dozens of people interested. Is this normal for Sacramento. My previous experience as landlord in the Bay Area tells me that this much interest means I’ve priced the units too low. Considering re-listing them at a higher price but I don’t want to be greedy. Not sure where to go from here. 

Hi, I’d love to hear from investors in Sacramento about your experiences, good and bad, with property management companies in the area. I’m on the fence about using a property manager for a duplex I just acquired and I’m curious about what kinds of experiences people have had.

I love this discussion, so helpful to get these different points of view. I am new to BP but not new to rei. I have a full time career and it doesn’t involve real estate at all. After spending 17 years house hacking several duplexes in the Bay Area that needed lots of work, the idea of passive income sounds wonderful. However, OOS turn keys do seemed frowned upon here on BO. I love hearing from people who’ve had success with them. @Axel Meierhoefer, do you mind sharing which turn key companies you’ve used?

Also want to make sure you know that the 250k tax exemption is for any 2 years out of the most recent 5. You can move out and rent it for 3 years before you’d lose the exemption.

How long have you owned it? Can you just keep it as a rental? The 250k tax exemption is good as long as you’ve lived in the house for 2 out of the last 5 years so you likely have lots of time left to rent it. And if you keep it as a rental for longer than that and then decide to sell, you can indefinitely defer capital gains taxes by buying another rental somewhere else and doing a 1031 exchange. Can you get a cash flow from renting? By sticking it out through years of gangs and drug dealers in north oakland and then south Berkeley, the two houses I house hacked became very valuable. I’d say it was all worth it... as long as your tenants are paying rent through the pandemic and the rent is enough to pay for the house. I don’t know what the Bay Area appreciation and specifically fruitvale will do over the next few years but I do know that sticking it out even through the housing crash when my house was under water ended up being a very good thing for me.

So glad you asked this question, I need the same thing. And Joe Bertolino, thanks for answering!