All Forum Posts by: Russell W.

Seems unusual in the first place to have a concrete landing on a frame house. My guess is that the water is coming in between where the concrete meets the house, but perhaps you know that already. You may need to put flashing where the two meet to direct water away from that transition. I work in commercial construction and for balconies (which would be a similar condition) we use a traffic coating (water proofing) over the top of the concrete and a drip edge on the perimeter at the underside of the balcony to prevent water from rolling back in. Both can be done, but perhaps not worth the cost

The shutoffs are useless unless accessible. You should consider relocating them to an accessible area, or installing an access panel that will allow you to turn them on and off. 

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Ev...

The straightforward answer to your question is yes, it is possible to refinance the property into a conventional loan with a bank. There are a few underlying factors, as others have mentioned. A seller agrees to owner financing for a variety of reasons, but one is to earn interest payments over a defined length of time. That might be the full term of 30 years, or it might be after 1, 5, 7, X... years with a balloon payment (loan payoff, i.e. you refinancing). Similar to commercial loans, a savvy seller will also specify a pre-payment penalty for an early payoff. So, for example, if you agreed to a 5 year term, but decided to refinance into a conventional loan after 3 years, there might be a pre-payment penalty of 2%. As the knowledgeable investor, you should be specifying these terms regardless. 

You should run multiple scenarios to see what the property value might be after X number of years, and look at an amortization table for principal owed after that same amount of time.  As others have mentioned, there may not be a scenario where you have enough equity in the property to meet a 70-75% loan-to-value without bringing in additional money to close, not without holding for a long enough period of time.

Don't get discouraged with getting beat out. Stick to your criteria and don't overpay. Something will stick eventually and the way the universe usually works you'll be so glad the previous offers weren't accepted. If you're getting beat out by all-cash offers and you're not able to offer all-cash, there's not too much you can do. Certainly get a preapproval letter if you haven't done so already. Make your terms more attractive; find a mortgage broker who can close quicker (i.e. not one of the national banks). Or be flexible on your closing timeline to accommodate the seller's needs. What kind of financing are you seeking? FHA is often viewed as overly burdensome and timely. If you're comfortable with it, you can offer an as-is purchase. Keep your inspection contingency in place, but after the inspection it's simply a "yes or no" in terms of moving forward with the purchase. The seller doesn't have to deal with credits or repairs.

In my opinion, if this is your first deal you should stay close to home. Are you searching somewhere in the city, or one of the surrounding suburbs? Best of luck!

Well then the month to month is key, it alleviates that problem entirely

@Jonathan Klemm should be a good resource for this. 

I've had this same situation a couple times, where I've wanted to renovate a bathroom in a 2 bed / 1 bath apartment while still occupied by tenants. Generally tenants are thrilled that they're getting a renovated bathroom and from my experience are willing to work with you to make it happen. It does take some careful coordination though. If it isn't a huge bathroom you can have the entire project knocked out in 3 days (highly dependent on the quality and reliability of your contractor). I start off by asking the tenant if there's a a few days where they might be out of town and schedule it for that period. Otherwise, I've had tenants offer to stay with family/friends for a couple days to accommodate. If you can't work that out you may need to offer to pay for a hotel stay for a couple nights. Of course none of this matters if there's more than one bathroom in the rental. 

As far as the rent goes, that one is tricky. You might be able to work out an increased rent before the term of the lease is complete, but I've always left the rent amount unchanged until the lease is over, raising it at renewal. The way I see it is I'm getting some much needed renovating completed while the apartment is occupied, as opposed to when sitting vacant, and if the tenant is willing to help me out in that sense (and they're good tenants, as is the case for you) I see it as a win-win and realize the benefits over the long term. The unrealized rent increase is just a project cost.

Interested to hear responses as well. I use a firm called Sarnoff & Baccash, they were a referral from my real estate attorney. It's somewhat difficult to evaluate a property tax attorney. Many of them charge the same percentage-of-savings based fee, and as long as their appeal produces any amount of savings I assume they have done a much better job than I would have done myself. Who else are the Chicago BP'ers using?

Sounds like this would happen regardless of the furnace location (although I'm sure the heat of the furnace certainly doesn't help). The sun is going to melt the snow as you've mentioned. Have you considered installing gutter heat-trace cables? You can have them installed in a "wave" pattern along the bottom portion of the sloped roof near the gutter, then inside the length of the gutter, as well as down the length of the down-spout. The purpose is not to completely melt all the snow and ice, but rather to create a path for water to flow. If you don't have the same issue during warm months when it rains, then it's the ice-damming that is the problem you should be trying to solve.

Source: I had this same issue here in Chicago winters and resolved it by installing heat trace cables.

Frequently people will post on the forums asking opinions about buying old houses/buildings, what to look out for during inspections and what considerations to make when structuring an offer. This is a short story about one of the things to look out for...

My wife and I recently moved into a single family home built in 1908. One of the things I always make note of (whether for my investment properties or for my personal residence as is the case in this purchase) is the type of plumbing for both supply lines and waste/vent stacks. With the exception of one remodeled area, our home was plumbed entirely in galvanized steel pipes, very likely the original pipes from 113 years ago. It was an issue I was aware of and willing to accept.

Our kitchen sink had been draining slowly since moving in, so I removed the p-traps, stuck a shop-vac in the trap arm to clean out as much sludge as I could, and reinstalled new traps. This seemed to help a bit, until it started slowly draining again. One trick I typically use in this scenario is to fill the sink to the brim and then pull the drain stopper. The head pressure of the water will usually push through whatever blockage is in the trap arm between the sink and vertical stack. In this case, it did nothing. With a sink full of about 5 gallons of water I decided to do what any homeowner with galvanized pipes should not do: plunge the sink.

With only a couple plunges, the sink drained, and quickly. Voila! Problem solved! That is, until I heard the sound of a torrential downpour coming from the basement... The amount of pressure caused by the plunger ruptured the bottom of the paper-thin galvanized pipe and let all the water out between the walls and down into the basement. After tearing out backs of cabinets, and then breaking away plaster and lath, I found the culprit. The first picture is the bottom of the pipe between the sink and the vertical stack. It likely was not pitched enough to provide proper flow to the vertical stack. As a result water would pool on the bottom portion of the pipe, and over time corrode the steel. Apparently it had been hanging on just enough to actually hold water. The second picture is a cross section of the 2" vertical stack I cut out. It had become so corroded and consequently gummed up with sludge, that the diameter was no more than 3/4".

So, the point of this story is to provide some visual insight into why galvanized pipes are a risk exposure. While this might not be typical in every instance, the fact is that galvanized pipes corrode over time. The question is how long will it take. It doesn't mean you shouldn't buy a property with galvanized pipes, but understand that they may need to be replaced at some point and the cost implications involved.