All Forum Posts by: Marie-therese Tai

Thanks all. I decided not to sell, shortly after that the pandemic hit, I have mixed feelings about it, still second guess myself, but the upside is I own the building outright and your responses have given me the foundation for how I will approach selling if and when I do decide to sell later on

So I have a  small mixed use property, I have been approached with an offer for purchase by a developer , I would stand to make a pretty good profit,, but it would mean that I would go from owning an office to having to rent elsewhere, my lease is going to be up at my current office in another year, and before this I was thinking of moving there. My accountant thinks the real estate market is softening, and I should take the money and use it to invest elsewhere if necessary, for what it's worth I will end up having to pay around 200K in capital gains and other taxes if I sell because it's not my primary residence. Any thoughts ?

Seems dead cheap to me, but then I'm in NYC, everything here costs an arm and a leg

Personally , I would let him forfeit his deposit and possibly another months rent while I look for another tenant,  I don't really want anyone living in my property that doesn't want to be there. People can be spiteful, and it's not worth the potential hassle that an unhappy tenant can cause. 

@Jay Hinrich, "Landlord drama', tell me about it , it's another reason why I also go back and forth over buying a multifamily versus investing in REITs. I'm a rather conservative investor, and at this point I'm open to passive income flow, rather than the hands on, "I've locked myself out'  1 am calls

@Brian, and that is a perfectly reasonable position to take, in my situation I'm in NYC, a very tenant friendly state, it's not unknown to be tied up in court for a year trying to evict a bad tenant, it happened to me, took eight months to get him out , situations like that can quickly mess up a positive cash flow, if I had a mortgage on that property I would have been in bad shape. For my next property I intend to be less risk averse

I will start by saying that I know that this is an unpopular position to take. I had been holding on to this money for a couple of years hoping to get a multifamily , but the prices in NYC are just crazy right now, I feel that we're in a bit of a bubble, and it came down to a choice between keeping it in a 1 year CD and generating 4K,or paying off my mortgage and saving 8K/year. I chose the latter. So as of today I am the proud owner of two properties that I own outright. By my calculations I'll make that cash back in a couple of years , and if as I suspect things go south in the interim I intend to take out a HELOC , it will cost me 50 -75 bucks a year plus closing costs, in return I will have the same $200K that I spent at my fingertips . Folks can talk about leveraging and deals and that might be great for some, for me I have a great deal of peace of mind knowing I am not sweating over my mortgages. As for the issue of tax benefits of the mortgage interest, well thats a moot point with the new tax plan, and I am happy to forgo that considering the fact that I saved almost $200K over the life of the loan. So yeah, I paid off my mortgage and I'm not sorry one bit. I just wonder if there are any other 'contrarian' real estate investors out there

I'd have just evicted her through legal means, I'm considering evicting an annoying tenant as we speak, just trying to figure out when would be the best time to deal with that headache

I couldn't agree more, I have been saying this for ages. The current situation is not sustainable. When this market crashes it will drop like a stone, I believe the tariff war heating up is just hastening on the inevitable, and above all it's the reason why I decided to put off buying another multifamily. The real estate market prices I am seeing right now make no sense . I'd rather work on paying off my home. I have one investment property that I own outright,  and enough cash to buy another property outright when the real estate market tanks, my feeling is , a lot of the people singing the song of leveraging debt are going to be in bad shape. 

Don't send her a letter telling her to remove the dog, you want her out, if she gets rid of the dog you'll be back to square one, start the eviction process,asap on the grounds that she violated the lease, and don't beat yourself up too much. I once let to a tenant who claimed he had no credit history because he paid cash for everything, he was a minister,he sounded great , as soon as he moved in he was partying and indulging in various un minister like activities, a google search turned up the fact that he'd spent 20 years in jail for murder and was making up for all the lost time. He stopped  paying his rent two months after he moved in , it took another 7 months to get him out. I ended up having to help him physically pack his cr@p because he was trying to move with a shopping cart