All Forum Posts by: Tara G.

5 years! You persevered Will, I am sure I would have fallen apart! Enjoy your victory, you deserve it. Funded your GFM account, have a go with the sledgehammer for me!

10 minutes.. I have two kids and thats all the travel time I can manage now.. I sometimes cant find anything to keep buying in that radius, though. So I may extend the radius once they grow up a little..

Way back when I was a few years into my first job, a distinguished looking older gentleman in the elevator asked me (since the firm I worked for had the entire floor) what I did there. I said I was an architect. He looked me up and down- "You cant be an architect! You are too....... young". I had 3 things going against me- I am a woman, I WAS young, and I am a brown immigrant. Architects were supposed to be copies of Frank L Wright- white, older males. Most principals at firms were and still are males. So yes, I get the occasional code official who speaks down to me like I wont understand the "technical stuff" and I pull out my variance request with a justification from the code interpretation. I usually get the variance with a smile to go with it:-)

There are advantages to being a woman: Folks are more courteous and eager to help and there is less yelling. There was only one situation where a vendor yelled at me and another threatened to box his ears if he did not stop, LOL!

Cant say I have been discriminated against because I don't let "me" get in the way of things I want to do:-)

Thanks Pat, but he wont tell. You know the type? The ones that hold all their cards close to their hearts? Cant blame him, I am competition:-)

Hitting the 4 mortgage wall repeatedly and getting a run around from the folks claiming they offer financing for 4-10 properties, I dug deep into the Deed of Trust Data base at our county and figured out that they prolific investor (who beat us out of many properties at foreclosure auction) is getting loans from American Internet Mortgage for 4 properties at a time on the same date!! (and here we have trouble getting money for the 5th one!) Our local bank that we had been working with is taking a break from buy and hold to balance their portfolio..

A quick google search found some unhappy customers and a bunch of rosy reviews that looked like they came from a review factory. I figured, maybe it may be better with investors, since we supposedly know what we are doing (wink, wink). This is for buy and hold properties.

So, Anyone work with them before? I dont want to waste my time running down financing leads only to find out they cant close on time or cant close at all!

Does the pad slope away from the house? Does the door that leads to it have a threshold? There will always be things that are not up to the newest code in all homes. This is not a life safety issue- I dont think this will be a very big deal...

Bet the contractors want you to tear it up and replace it:-)

LOL, I had a tenant buy a home and move out 4 months into their lease and they wanted me to give back their entire security deposit- I did refund it, less realtor fees, cleaning costs and time the home was empty. They threatened me with a lawsuit claiming constructive eviction. And all the time I was thinking, it would have been so much better if they had just talked to us about buying a home and wanting to move out. Oh well, people will treat your property as a temporary storage and crashing place, cant do anything about it. Make sure you are playing fair (and it seems like you are), but be firm with what you will and will not do. Better to let this tenant go though, you dont want a whiner on your hands. Good Luck.

Amazing redesign! Did you do the design? Whoever did it has very good vision and excellent taste. You deserve every penny of that profit! Congratulations!

I had something of the second situation happen almost after the fact, for a landlord client of mine. It turned out OK, thank goodness!

Wife saw with her agent, 3 kids. Agent says, wife separating from husband, wants to be closer to work. Everything checks out, sign lease. Then I get a call from my client that husband got in touch trying to get dimensions of living room.. My alarm bells start going off, I contact her agent and ask. He says he knows nothing about it. I say, we really cant comment on their family situation, but I need him on the application before we do anything further. They say they are royalty from an African country (dont want to name it) and are P'd off that I would want to run back ground checks. MOre alarm bells!!! I tell my clients, hold on everything until we sort this out. Eventually, I get the information, run checks, find a simple assault charge against the husband that the wife apparently did not know about, and it is one big mess. I check with the town police, that charge was dropped, I tell my clients everything seems OK, go ahead. They get the keys but dont turn utilities to their name, Royalty dont need utilities, right? A week and a hald into the tenancy, no electricity so garage door wont open, fridge is leaking puddles. Royalty doesnt want to deal with me because I am being tough on them, LOL!

Anyways, long story short, they have been model tenants since then, but you wouldnt know it from all the drama going in. I am happy for my clients:-) There is almost always more to a tenant's story, some good, mostly bad:-) Be patient, listen to your gut and apply criteria uniformly, you will be fine. It is slow at this time, so dont try and just fill the place. Better to have no deal than a bad deal! Good Luck..

I am with J. Scott on this. I would have just given away our negotiating power if I told the seller she was selling at a deep discount. Not to mention that I just did my client the biggest disservice, which will get me in worse trouble than a seller who did not know they were selling at a discount. Now if I offered to represent the seller, and brought a (related or unrelated) buyer in the transaction, dual agency would kick in, in which case I dont tell any one anything unless it is material fact! As far as I know, price is not a material fact. With a related buyer, I would need to disclose that relationship. I assume we are talking about a situation where there is no duress and everyone is generally honest.

First flip, our real estate agent made more money than we did:-) Figured I needed to get my own license pronto!