All Forum Posts by: Matt R.

Disclaimer: This is based on experience living in Oklahoma and Missouri.  I don't own any properties that are next to or close to a Walmart.  I don't work for Walmart or any of their competitors.

The Walmarts I've shopped at tend to have multi-family properties (duplexes, apartments with maybe 6 to 8 units each) fairly close by, and then single-family homes further away.

The one where I shop now has an apartment complex right next door, and I've seen people carrying bags out of the store and heading for the apartments.  When it was first built, there was a fence down the property line between the complex and Wal-Mart; the apartment residents made a hole in the fence so they could cut their walking distance to the store, so the complex eventually put a gate in instead.

There is a Walmart on the far east side of Kansas City, MO that has a bus stop in the parking lot. Lots of people will ride the bus to that Walmart to go shopping; there aren't very many good alternatives for groceries on the east side of town.

If your potential owner or tenant might not have a car, or maybe they want to not use a car so much, then "walk to Walmart" is a good selling point, I think.

Walmart also has a couple of different store formats.  The Supercenter is the big one - with a grocery store on one side, clothes in the middle, and dry goods on the other side.  The Neighborhood Market is a lot smaller and almost all groceries.

For a Supercenter, there will be lots of car traffic, and lots of semi-truck traffic for deliveries.  A Neighborhood Market will have less traffic than a Supercenter, but still a good amount.  A Supercenter is probably a better "draw" than a Neighborhood Market, but a Neighborhood Market can be a good draw if there aren't any other inexpensive grocery stores nearby.

This is becoming slightly less common over time, but sometimes Walmart will up and move their store, which usually results in a giant empty box at the existing location.  If there was an associated strip mall with the existing location, often those small stores will empty out too.  I think this happened more in the 1990s and 2000s, as they built Supercenters to replace existing smaller stores.  Now, they almost always start a new store as a Supercenter, in a location where they'll have plenty of business for it.  My unofficial estimate is that if you have a brand-new Supercenter, it'll probably be there for 15 to 20 years at least.

I've never invested in airport parking, but I watched some drama unfold around the development of one once.  Take a look at the budget for a commercial airport, from the city aviation department, or port authority, or whoever runs it.  Often, you will find that the airport is an enormously profitable parking lot, with free runways and terminals attached.  In other words, most of their money comes from automobile parking fees, not landing fees or gate fees or anything to do with aircraft.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the early 2000s, a guy named Mike Fine had made some money operating taxicabs, and decided he wanted to build and run a parking garage next to the airport.  Once the city figured out what he was trying to do, they saw it as a threat to their on-airport parking revenue, and started jerking him around on the zoning, building permits, building code, etc.  He fought through it, opened his garage, and apparently does good business, but he had to spend some money on lawyer food to get there.

I don't know if this exists in Chicago, but I used to work in a building in Oklahoma that might work for what you want.  It billed itself as a "business park", but it wasn't full of big-box commercial.

From the street, the building looked kind of like a strip mall - long one-story building, overhang roof with signs on it, plate-glass windows, glass doors, individual "stores" about 15-20 feet wide.  But, if you went around to the back side, each "store" had a roll-up garage door on it.

When you went in the glass door from the street side, there would usually be a drywalled office room or two in front, next to the windows.  Next back was a small bathroom.  Behind that, it was up to the tenant.

The unit I worked in had drywalled offices almost all the way back.  There was a "closet" door in the back, and when you opened it, you were looking at the back of the roll-up door.  There was a plumber in one of the other units; he had a couple of offices up front by the windows for doing paperwork, and the rest of it was in "garage" finish - no partition walls, shelves and racks up against one wall, and enough room to pull one of his vans in and load it up with stuff for the next job.

For your needs, you could put the computer(s) up front in the "office", and then finish out the "garage" part in back like a gym.

I don't know what the lease terms were like; I just worked there.  :)

Alternatively, get a big self-storage space that faces south, put down the turf and rubber mats in there, and shoot videos when the sun is shining.  :D  (Self-storage places either don't have electricity or have one bulb on a timer in the center of the ceiling - not so great for shooting video.)  Take the cameras home and edit the video together on your PC.

I hope this helps!

I don't know, but I think what may be happening is that your tenant was previously getting assistance from both Section 8 and SAVE.  That tenant needed a different place, for whatever reason, and chose your property.  Section 8 said they'd only pay $980, so the tenant asked SAVE if SAVE could pay the difference of $120, and SAVE said yes.

Something that seems a little strange here, though, is that I've heard that Section 8 wants what they pay, plus what the tenant pays, to be the entire amount of rent.  In other words, the landlord or PM isn't allowed to say "I want the rent to be $1000, but the combination of the Section 8 assistance and your Section 8 contribution will be $900.  So you need to pay me $100 cash on the side so we're even."  This situation sort of feels like that.  Maybe it's different if the "extra" money is coming from an assistance agency like SAVE.  I have zero experience with Section 8.

It might be worth trying to talk to SAVE.  They probably can't give you specific information on a particular client of theirs, but you could ask them if combining their rent assistance with Section 8 is a thing that happens.

Disclaimer: I am not a professional electrician.

One way to answer "how many light fixtures do I need" is to test it out.  Buy one or two can lights and bulbs for them.  Wire a short cord with a plug to each light, and then use extension cords to plug the lights into the wall.  Hold them up next to the ceiling in your bedroom, switch off the existing light, and see what you think.  This will show you about how much the light spreads out by the time it gets to the bed and the floor, so you can decide on the spacing.  (The lights have to be properly wired when permanently installed; using the plug and extension cord is just for testing.)

If you buy can lights for an existing house, make sure you get ones rated "insulation contact" or "IC".  These are safe for the attic insulation to touch.  It is possible to get lights rated "non insulation-contact", but for those, you have to build a box around the fixture up in the attic if you ever want to add insulation.

Also, if you get can lights that take incandescent or compact fluorescent bulbs, install the correct bulbs - usually reflector bulbs.  You can put a "regular" bulb in it (like you would use in a table lamp), but then you get a very narrow beam of light directly underneath the can light, instead of a spread-out beam that you would get from a reflector bulb.

It's probably worthwhile to tell Postlets/Zillow support about it via the "Contact Us" link on their pages.  They may not be able or willing to fix it immediately, but if they get enough reports on the same problem, they can either work on it, or at least put up a notice on the submission form.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

One thing to keep in mind is that texts don't necessarily go through right away, or at all.  This might be an issue if you're doing something like telling the tenant you want to inspect the property.  Say local law calls for a 24-hour notice for you to enter the property.  You text them at 9 AM Monday telling them you want to inspect at 10 AM Tuesday, but they don't get the text until 10:30 AM Monday... they might be able to argue that you didn't provide the required notice.

You may be able to avoid some problems by asking the tenant to text you back to confirm that they got your text.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

You might consider installing empty conduit, with pull boxes as needed, from the place where the wires come up to the building to the individual unit(s).  That way, if a tenant switches providers, all the new provider has to do is run new cable through the conduit, rather than attacking the property with 2" hole saws.  :)  You may need to be there in person to show the 18-year-old kid how to pull a wire through the conduit, though.

Dish and DirecTV have an "antenna mount" that is basically an angle-iron frame about three feet square with a post in the middle for the dish.  You lay the frame down, somewhere where the dish can see the sky to the south, and then put cinder blocks on the frame to keep it there.  This can live on a flat roof, or on the ground next to the building.  This avoids having lots of holes in your roof.

Your post title caught my eye just because I used to live in Oklahoma... partly out in the sticks, and partly in Tulsa.  I've never invested in mobile homes, so I can't speak much to the financial aspects.  I *have* helped fix a few of them, and been to one that was on fire (!), so if you've never lived in one before, maybe some of this will help...

In my experience, the fittings in a mobile home are Slightly Different[tm] than what they would be in a stick-built house.  If you have to make a repair, like replacing a faucet or a sink trap or something, you can't just walk into the hardware store and buy the thing that they have stacks and stacks of - that one will be for a stick-built house.  The mobile-home stuff will be available at the hardware store, but you have to look around for it.  You may need to go to one particular store in town to find the right stuff.

Usually the wiring, plumbing, etc that was done in the factory is reasonably OK, but the quality of the stuff that is done locally when the house is set in place varies a *lot*.  It is probably a good idea to put on your tusslin' clothes and crawl around in the dirt under the house and inspect the connections to the water, sewer/septic, electric, and gas/propane (if equipped).  Look for long sections of pipe that aren't mechanically supported, wire nuts waving in the breeze, people using garden hose for the propane line, etc.  Also make sure the water pipe(s) under the house have insulation and maybe electric heat tape on them.

The one that was on fire happened because the owner had installed air conditioning.  The wiring was a piece of indoor cable (no conduit) that came down through the floor of the home, under a hay bale (there was no skirt), and then to the outside unit.  There was a short or a bad splice in this wire that heated up and set the hay bale on fire, which then caught the house on fire.

If this one is out in the country a little, that may be attractive to people that just don't want their neighbors so close, or want to do something that's not as easy to do in town... like park their big pickup or semi-tractor, or have a garden, or whatever.

I hope this helps!

I hadn't heard of SAVE before, but their website says they started out in the 1980s as a hospice for people living with HIV or AIDS.  More recently (not sure exactly when), they expanded their scope "to serve those managing a mental illness and substance abuse, in addition to those living with HIV/AIDS." Looking at their list of services , the one that seems to match the situation the best is "Tenant Based Rental Assistance", although it could be a couple of their other programs.  It appears they are a 501(c)(3) non-profit.