All Forum Posts by: Richard C.

It is funny how your perspective changes depending on where you are sitting.

I could imagine those two agents posting on an internet forum for real estate agents, talking about the lengths they had to go to to protect their elderly, seriously ill client from an unethical, fake buyer who was trying to take advantage of him with some sort of scammy-sounding "creative" offer that leaves all the risk with their client while requiring the "buyer" to put essentially none of his own skin in the game.

Not saying that's you, but I could see it.

And I say this as a guy ...not as a broker or agent protecting my sinecure.

I sign contracts with a auto dealer to purchase 100 cars at $25,000 a piece, which would otherwise retail for $30,000. I can do this because I am a supposedly cash buyer purchasing in bulk.

I then sell those contracts to individual buyers for $27,000. Maybe I even set up a legal entity to facilitate that. Rent an office, have a website, etc., etc. I sell my contract to buy at $25k for $27k before I am actually required to put up the money and take possession of the car.

You are claiming that the fact that I am a principal to the initial contract, and to the second, is going to insulate me from having to be licensed as an automobile dealer?

Excuse me for a moment while I laugh myself silly.

OK, I'm back. I'll tell you what, if I were actually going to buy trying to make that argument to my state's licensing board, I would for good, g-ddam sure want to be able to prove that I had a quarter million in liquid assets at the time I signed the initial contracts. And I would want to be able to prove that I had made preparations to take delivery. Just to demonstrate that I was a bona fide buyer of those cars. And even then, I'd be hitting the rosary beads pretty hard, and promising God I would never do it again if He had pity on me this time, like an 18-year-old Alpha Chi pledge experiencing his first real hangover.

Now, do you suppose most "wholesalers" have the means and intent to purchase the properties they place under contract? Let's say I have my doubts. And without the means and intent, you're not a bona fide buyer, and so not a "principal" to anything real. You're an unlicensed broker who believes that he has outsmarted people with decades of experience and a duty to protect the public from the unscrupulous.

Wholesalers get away with what they do because they are largely operating under the radar, not because their sham transactions actually exempt them from the law.

And I say this as a guy who thinks the the Realtors are fighting a desperate, probably futile rear-guard action against technological and social changes that are quickly rendering them obsolete, not as a broker or agent protecting my sinecure.

Read more carefully, guys. The $1500 is what he is paying in rent now. Information offered to illustrate the potential benefit of buying the trailer.

To answer the OP, if you can stand living there, maybe not a bad idea. As a rental, terrible investment.

Love that Brier Island house. Same house on the Southern Maine or NH coast would be something like ten times that much, and on the Cape, MV or Nantucket I don't even know how much.

It is actually very possible to negotiate a price discount with Comcast.

Put another way, is it unreasonable for a good, high-value, long-term customer to ask for a discount?

I find that people on here tend to apply different standards (as supposed absolute rules, or "only what's reasonable") depending on which side of the transaction they are on.

If you are a good, high-value, long-term customer of say, your local paint store, do you think a discount is out-of-line? I sure don't. Is it unreasonable to ask for? Heck no.

We see this on the "Tenant Applicants say the Dumbest things" type of threads, where people mock tenant applicants for negotiating a business transaction. Often by asking for discounts for EXACTLY the some sorts of things that we would ask for discounts for when we are buying the place to begin with.

So asking for a discount because the dryer is 10 years old is "pushy" and "entitled" when a tenant does it, but not when a landlord is buying? Don't think so.

I don't have any tenants whose rent I have reduced yet (I only have 3!), and I would never move it down if they never asked. But if they ask, I have at least one I will seriously consider giving it to.

Because "very good" tenants who are "very easy on the property" do not exactly grow on trees.

Most expensive house within 10 miles of my own:

Pre-Revolutionary War farmhouse on almost 300 acres. $4.75 million.

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/133-Richardson-Rd_Lyndeborough_NH_03082_M32344-82145?row=1

That's a 3/3, 3800 sf. On a very nice 10 acre lot, though.