All Forum Posts by: Matt R.

Like everybody said, that's your water meter.  For far more than you wanted to know about all of that stuff, read on.

The pipe coming through the wall with drywall on it is the connection to the city water main.  There are two wires clamped to it.  The big black insulated one will go to your circuit breaker panel or fuse box; it's there so the electrical service can use the (metal) pipe under your yard as a ground.  The bare copper one goes to another clamp on the other side of the meter; it's there so the plumbing in the house is still grounded, even if the meter is gone, or replaced by one with a plastic body.

The yellow handle is a valve.  With the handle in line with the pipe, like it is now, it's open.  If you turn the handle so it's 90 degrees to the pipe, it's closed.  It's a ball valve, so it only takes one quarter turn to get from fully closed to fully open.  If you close this valve, it will turn off all the water to the entire house.

The next thing is the water meter, as has been mentioned.  A lot of them will normally make a clicking noise if you have something using water; if it clicks when you think there should be no water running, that means you have a leak.  Also, that little red triangle you can see through the clear top of the meter will spin, even when a very small amount of water is flowing - to see it, turn the kitchen sink cold water full on, go look at the meter for a minute, then turn the kitchen sink down to a trickle, and go look at the meter again.  If you can catch the triangle moving when you think everything should be shut off - you have a leak.  I'm not sure what the red sweep needle does.  There *may* also be a set of number wheels visible through the clear top of the meter; that number should resemble the ones on your water bill.

The skinny red and green wires connected to the meter, that go into a cable, are for the remote-reading device on the meter; if you follow that cable far enough, it will go to a plastic box or puck on the outside of the house somewhere.  The older ones had a connector in the plastic box - the meter reader had to plug a hand-held device into the connector to get the reading.  The newer ones are contactless - the meter reader just holds their hand-held device up against the puck for a couple of seconds to get the reading.  (Before these existed, somebody from the water utility had to come into your house to read the meter.  Sometimes they'd send you a postcard and ask you to fill in the reading and mail it back. )

The next thing is the clamp for the other end of the bare copper wire that keeps the house plumbing grounded.

The next thing with the yellow handle is another valve.  Same as the first valve - the handle the way it is now is open, at 90 degrees to the pipe it will be closed.  Closing this valve will *also* turn off all the water to the whole house.

You only technically need one of these valves, and a lot of houses will only have one, usually on the city side of the water meter (the first valve I talked about, in your picture).  Having two is only really useful when replacing the water meter - closing the second valve means that the plumber doesn't have to deal with all the water in the house pipes running out when they remove the meter.

The last thing is the cold water pipe running up the wall.  It will branch off to the "cold" side of all the sinks and tubs, all the toilets, and all the outdoor hose bibbs.  It will also go to the inlet side of the water heater.

Like I said, probably way more than you wanted to know about it.

You probably need an attorney.  I am not an attorney and this is not legal advice.

One of the attorneys in my area (Kansas City) that does a lot of landlord-tenant and eviction cases has been giving updates on the general situation every few weeks.  It's possible to get a court hearing to challenge the tenant's CDC declaration.  The lawyer said she wins some of these and loses some of these; the odds vary from county to county.

She has also said, in general, that once you get a CDC declaration from a tenant, you can't do anything else until you get a court order of some kind.  I would assume that this means: you have a hearing, you win, you can proceed with eviction; you have a hearing, you lose, you have to wait until the CDC order expires; you don't have a hearing, you have to wait until the CDC order expires.

Again, I am not an attorney and this is not legal advice.  You should talk to an attorney that does landlord-tenant law in your area.

I use Cozy to collect payments.  It's free to me, and free to the tenants if they pay from a bank account.  (If the tenant pays by credit card, the tenant also has to pay the credit card fee of about 2.75%.)  Cozy does sit on the payments for a few days; I think, but don't know, that they're doing some kind of short-term investing with the money to fund their service.  Note that Cozy was recently bought by apartments dot com, so the pricing and feature set may change in 2021.

I wrote a long post about my experience with Cozy a couple of years ago: https://www.biggerpockets.com/...

See this recent thread for more ideas: https://www.biggerpockets.com/...

I don't work for any companies mentioned.

If they need a loan, the mobile home may need to be newer than about 1998 for the lender to approve it.  There will be a metal plate somewhere on the outside with the year built, along with some pieces of paper pasted up inside (kitchen cabinets or near breaker box) with more information.  This came up in a previous thread about mobile home investing: https://www.biggerpockets.com/...

I second the idea of talking to a structural engineer.  It may cost some money to have them come out, but they should be able to give you a fairly detailed report.

You might also ask your insurance agent, and maybe the bank/lender.  If the insurance can show that you knew about a foundation issue, didn't repair it, and then something bad happens later, they might try to use it to deny your claim.  The bank/lender may not care as much, but they might.

Services like Cozy will do some of this for you.   Their main claim to fame is taking payments online, but I know you can also create listings and do applications through them.  The basic service is free, but they fund it by sitting on your rent payments for a few days.  A lot of people don't mind that; a lot of people do.  Also, Cozy got bought by apartments dot com, so the feature set and pricing may change some time in 2021.

If you have your own site, you probably don't want to take payments "yourself" - where your site handles people's credit card or bank account numbers directly.  It's possible to do this, but not with 18-year-old "web developers" cutting and pasting code from StackExchange.  The magic word for taking credit or debit cards is "PCI DSS compliance"; say that to a prospective website vendor and watch the price double.

To take payments, third-party services like Paypal or Square make it easy to integrate their services into your site; the tenant goes to your site, clicks a "pay rent" button, logs in to Paypal or Square to actually input their payment details, and then Paypal or Square tells you that they paid, and how much.  The down side of this is that they get a cut - about 2.9% for credit cards.  Don't try to skip the fees by setting up a "personal" account instead of a "business" one; they know about that trick already.

It would also be possible to have your own site for listings, applications, etc, and then link the tenants to a service like Cozy to make their payments.

If there's a real estate agent involved, get a referral from them... and then hire somebody else.  The inspector your agent refers you to has a problem: they have to find enough stuff that it looks like they did something, but not so much stuff that you back out of the deal.  If the inspector is responsible for that agent losing too many deals, the agent stops referring people to them.  Hire one that you find on your own and you don't have to worry about that.

There are a couple of different home inspector trade associations; the guy I use is a member of ASHI.  They have a looker-upper on their site.

I am not affiliated with any companies or associations mentioned.

I'd go over there and take a look at it first to make sure it's not a really cheap fix.  Nearly all icemakers will have a wire arm or a plastic flap that shuts off the icemaker when the ice bin gets full.  However, it can also get pushed into the "off" position if you're moving boxes around in the freezer.  Pulling that back towards "on", and maybe moving some of the freezer contents around, will fix it.

Some icemakers have a toggle or rocker switch on them that will turn them off; usually it's on the edge of that white plastic square you see on the front of the icemaker.  Make sure that switch is on.  If the fridge has an electronic control panel, go into the menus and see if the icemaker is shut off in there.

Sometimes the water line behind the fridge gets kinked and reduces or stops the water flow to the icemaker, especially if they've pulled the fridge out to clean and then pushed it back.  If possible, also follow the icemaker water line back to where it connects to a pipe; if it's in an unfinished basement, maybe somebody tried to hang something from the water line and kinked it that way.  There should be a valve where the icemaker water line connects to the pipe; make sure that valve isn't closed.

If all that is good, then you have to diagnose it further, which you may want a service tech to do.  If you don't already have the fridge model number, you can get it from the label on the fridge and Google a replacement icemaker for it; usually those are $70-$100 or so for the part.  (It could also be a cheaper part, like the water valve or the wiring, but you'd need to diagnose it or pay a tech to diagnose it to know for sure.)

If you're buying stuff at Home Depot, once the materials are over about $2,000 to $2,500, they will usually send it to their "pro desk" and try to get a lower bid.  That might help you save a little money on the materials.

You can get windows and doors with a higher-than-usual wind rating, but they cost more.  In some places, like Miami, my understanding is that either the city or your insurance company will require them.  Massachusetts may or may not require them, but if they do, or if your contractor is specifying those on their own, that might be part of the reason for the increased cost.  You might dig into what the city/county/township/state requirements are, and also see if your insurance company has any requirements on that.

I have a SFH in Independence; I live on the Missouri side of the KC metro. I think Independence is an OK area to invest in, but you probably need to think about exactly where the property is; northwest Independence, west of Sugar Creek, is a very different game than far east Independence. As an example of the variation, there are three high schools in the Independence school district, and GreatSchools rates them at 2, 4, and 5 (out of 10).

The Independence city government is nearly broke; they aren't as bad off as KCMO is, but they TIFd a bunch of new retail properties just in time for the End of Retail As We Know It (tm).  So they are doing things like creating new licensing requirements for businesses (including landlords) and cranking up the rates at the (city-owned) utilities to cover the shortfall.