All Forum Posts by: Mark Smith

Hello all,

I'm looking into doing my first flip.  The prospective house we are looking at is about 125 years old and has low ceilings on the second floor.  I'm 6' tall and went in with work boots on and could touch my head on the ceiling in one area.  Has anyone found this (low ceilings) to be an issue when trying to sell a house?  Just wanted to take it into consideration.

I am thinking about purchasing a two unit where one side is oil heat and the other is natural gas. I would live in the natural gas side for unrelated reasons, but my concern is not being able to find a tenant for the oil side. Oil would be tenant’s responsibility. How do you all see potential tenants react when they see that they would have oil heat?

@Grant Rothenburger the sump pump pumps into PVC that runs into the pump, and the water discharges from the drain in the bottom of the pump. Yes, the pump is outside.

Part of our thought process is that they installed this sump pump after our inspection was completed. The property was sold to us by a contracting company, they purchased it from the bank as a foreclosure. We're wondering if the fact that they did the work after our inspection period works in our favor at all. I don't believe the sump pump should have ever been run through the pool pump line.

We closed on a property in December, and along with the house came an in ground pool. The seller's only held the property for 7 months or so and I don't believe they ever ran the pool pump. When we first looked at the property the pool barely had any water in it, and the sellers never spoke to the functionality of the pump.

Before we closed the sellers installed a new sump pump and ran it through the pool pump, and it is consistently pushing water through the pump and out the drain at the bottom of the pump. Our concern is that the pump won't function come spring, we're worried about he lines freezing and breaking, or internal components of the pump being damaged.

So the question is, do we have any recourse against the sellers if the pump is not functional come spring? Or did we lose out since we didn't bring it up during inspection? Any attorneys out there that can chime in?

@Steven Hiscock just wanted to follow up on this.  Richard Mulvey is getting out of the individual tax return game and focusing more on corporate tax.  Check out John Hicks EA at Hicks Tax Consulting, that's who I'm going with this year.  Let him know I recommended you.

Yeah this would just be for heating.  I hope you're right!

I just moved into the duplex I am house hacking. I put in a couple 7 day programmable thermostats to take a step toward a more efficient house; each unit only has one thermostat. My question is, which would be more energy efficient: setting the thermostat at 65 and just leaving it, or actually programming it to drop the temperature when I leave and warm it up when I come back? I'm just wondering if it would actually take more energy to bring the place back up to temp than it would to just let it maintain one constant temperature. In case it helps, it is a gas/hot water system.

I'll try to keep this story short: I'm currently processing an applicant who is separating from her husband.  They are still friendly with each other, and the husband seems to want to help as much as possible.  As the wife does not have enough income to qualify for the unit, the husband has agreed to cosign.  How does this work?  Is it an extra paragraph in the lease and I have his signature on the lease?  Is it an entirely separate form?  Any advice or examples would be greatly appreciated!

Schlage keypad locks.  They'll cost you a bit up front ($120/ea) but you'll never have to deal with keys ever again.  You can just give your tenant a 4 digit door code, then when they move out you delete their code.  You can store up to 19 codes at one time, but of course you can just delete an re-enter new codes all you want.  You could use your own code for every lock, then have separate codes to each unit for the tenants.  And you can only change the code if you have the programming code, so tenants can't mess with it.  Check out the Schlage fe595, I just installed my first one and have ordered a second.