All Forum Posts by: Bobby Narinov

@John Polikolsky. Flex realty stole $1800 from me for cleanup and repairs needed to make the property presentable to the potential buyers. The have not even bothered to remove the trash from the last tenant and patch the holes in the walls. I saw the pictures that @Engelo Rumora from OhioCashFlow sent me when I hired them to do the management. Flex Realty's audacity is unreal. I think Mike is the only person working there and with 700+ units under management there is very little he can do about anything.

I wish you good luck with them. Maybe they care about you more because you have multiple houses with them. I have only one and this probably why I got screwed.

I was hopping that I can get Marshal Reddick to apply some pressure to them but they did nothing for me. So I am not sticking with them either.

@Douglas Bradford. The name of the new company is "Allynn James Real Estate Group".

Here is the mail sent to all of their customers(the bad formatting and weird line breaks are from the original document. Obviously no one bothered to proofread it: attention to details is not their strong suit):

Jim/James Moody & Flex Realty Stole over $3,920.00 from me.

Here is how he did it.

1. As part of the purchasing agreement Jim/James agreed to pay 3 years of flood insurance capped at $2,100 total. He paid the first year and pretended that I never asked the question every time I wanted my money. The flood insurance was part of the banks requirement because the property was in a flood zone. With over $700/year flood insurance I was ready to back off because this would eat all of my $75/month profit from the deal but Jim promised to pay 3 years of it just to make the deal happen. To make it worse, after the first year the government (flood insurance in Toledo is provided only by the government) jumped from $700/year to $1,100/year.  So I am still waiting on my $1400 flood insurance money.
2. In January 2016, my second tenant stop paying rent and utilities (Toledo is a place where the utilities are charged to the property owner). Over $500+ paid for utilities and tenant eviction. Months later instead of finding a new tenant James Moody persuaded me to sell the property claiming HUGE equities. That is when he stopped managing my property. According to my contract I had 2 years worth of "free property management". There is nothing more expensive than "FREE". Never the less since he stopped managing my property, he owes me money for it. 12 months by $60/month management is $720. Here I am not adding the multiple instances of $300.00+ city fees due to overgrown grass (caused by property non-management)
3. Finally, the largest one. As a part of making my property sell ready, James Moody asked me to pay $1800. He even got a third party handy man to quote me $3500 for the same job so paying $1800 (quoted by his Flexible Maintenance company) looked like a great price. Except it wasn't. Six months later, after staying on the market for 4 months and reassigning the lead broker to another girl from his team he concluded that no one could have sold it. After demanding a proof of work done, like the number of showings, calls or anything that can prove that he even attempted to do anything more than publish the address to the MLS he abruptly cancelled our relations. My new property manager @Engelo Rumora and his team (great people by the way) took pictures from the place: Trash and broken equipment in the basement, left by god knows what tenant, unpatched and unpainted walls, cracks in the walls, overgrown grass, bushes and trees. The place looked like no one took care of it for years. I finally realized that this is a pretty standard way for bad property managers to squeeze more money from going away owners: just ask them to pay for repairs and don't even bother doing them.  There is no way in hell they did anything to this property 4 months ago. They just stole $1800 from me.

When you add all up: $1,400.00 + $720.00 + $1,800.00 you get $3,920.00

This is the price I paid for trusting a crook. No wonder the government is investigating him for allegedly lining up his pockets. Once a crook is always a crook. 

@Robert H. i think the question is not whether James Moody has stolen from is you, the question is when is he going to do it. Just try leaving him and you will see the claws are coming out.

Right now I am paying 10% to my new property manager, I am making more money (so far) than with the free property management from Flex Property Management and James Moody. 

whatever you do don't go with "Allynn James Real Estate Group". I was told that Flex realty, Flex Property Management, Flexible Maintenance & God Knows what else they have, are going to change their name die to strategic reasons. i.e. we have to change our name because we have such a bad rap so no one wants to work with us. Hey this trick worked fine for Arthur Andersen (now Accenture) who missed the whole Enron Fiasco despite being their auditors for years so it probably will work for the renamed Flex (-ible ways to waste and steal your money) whatever.

Thank you for the advice. Unfortunately:

• as it turned out, they have no car insurance. That is a big omission on my side. I'll have to start demanding my tenants to have car insurance. I am not sure whether that is allowed in the Communist Community state of California but I'll consult with a lawyer.
• IANAL but: The Communist Community state of California does not allow you to take large deposits. To "protect the tenants", the maximum deposit amount a landlord can charge is two months of rent where a prepaid rent is considered deposit. Because of that, and to protect my investment I had to turn down plenty of tenants begging to live in my apartment complex. So the law really protected them from having a decent place to live.

I'll try not to give up on giving people a second chance but I cannot promise to do it forever especially if I keep loosing money. 

Yes I know, I should have screened my tenants better but I am a sucker for people trying to turn their live around.

I know that they (I hope I am using the politically correct pronoun here so my post don't get deleted by a trigger happy moderator) had drinking problems but that was over 5 years ago. I even talked to their sponsor before letting them in. Everything was fine for over three months until last Saturday when they fell off the wagon, started drinking again but instead of staying at home they decided to take a ride in their pickup truck.

The result was damages to another tenant's car and two cement block walls having over 20ft damages each. The innocent tenant car was pushed over the concrete parking stop and through the cement wall out of the yard. On the picture the tenant's car was balancing on the edge, hanging over 45% outside the wall. They had to use a crane to pull it back.

The police came, collected evidence and I hope her insurance will pay for the car damage of the other tenant.

I served them immediately with 3 day notice. As a result they are not paying me rent as well. That is one of those things that keeps telling me that I should stop giving people second chances but I keep trying not to listen. As they say: No good deed goes unpunished.

My question is can i file a claim against her car insurance for the property damages caused by their car? How? I do not want to go through my property insurance because the damages are under $2000 and I don't want my insurance to go up.

I have a tenant that passed away.

His adult kids came and cleaned up his place while he was still in the hospital.

After cleanup and repairs there is a small amount left. His kids want me to return it to them and they want the check payable to them.

I believe I should give them a check payable to my [dead] tenant but they disagree.

What should I do?

@Skylar Powell. Is your slumlord selling by any chance?

Hmmm. I was hoping to get more interest on this one.

I guess people don't want to argue the pros and cons of rewarding bad behavior. 

I am not pointing a camera directly at their entrance. I have camera that observes the public space of the whole wing of tenants: 6 units total. I have another one that point to the other wing - 4 units there as well. I have similar cameras monitoring my other 10 units. There are about 50 ft from my camera to their entrance but the camera is infrared 4 Mega pixels (records at 2560x1440).

45 days before installing the cameras I posted 8 large (18"x12") signs and 40 3"x4" signs that there is 24hrs surveillance and the manager talked to everyone to inform them about that. The I installed one camera pointing away from their place. That camera stayed there for several weeks before I installed another 4 cameras none of which was pointing toward them. The I ran out of the 1000' CAT5e cable so I had to wait 2 more weeks before installing the last 3 cameras. so all in all it took over 4 months to complete the installation. another month passed before I got them hooked up on the internet. That was when I was able to check on the when I was given notice.

The fact that I have cameras around the perimeter is actually a great thing because it looks like a number of people are coming to me because things can be recorded.

And I did contact my eviction company and that is why I am doing 60 days notice. I was just hoping to find some other way that I don't know. My eviction company uses a professional/certified servers with the option to hire a cop for serving the eviction notices. It costs only $50 per serving.