All Forum Posts by: Mark H.

Does your landlord insurance cover lost rents? I'd tell the tenant to leave, so you can fix the place properly. No way I'd get into the defects=discounts game, you can't win that one.

Without heat or electricity, the tenants are likely to kill themselves or damage the property further with candles for light & space heaters for heat.

The duct work is cheap, it's the labor that can eat you alive. No one can give you any idea about cost without seeing the house & the specs for what is required. Here in Phoenix, for attic installs on a ~1500 sq ft house, all you need for "ductwork" is a couple of ~$100 plenums (one for intake & one for exhaust), and a few ~$30 rolls of flexi-duct. Perhaps $500 for materials, and whatever your Hvac guy wants to charge for labor (usually some multiple of his diesel-super-duty 4x4's monthly payment).

If you need a steel trunkline & ducts, the labor & materials costs jump very quickly.

The $5k quote, if applied to a "typical" 1500 sq ft house would be fairly high retail for just an air conditioner. Equipment costs would be perhaps $2k of that $5k, unless you wanted one of the fancy brands.

The tax forgiveness act is irrelevant if you have $0 in the bank - you won't get a tax bill for walking away. The *only* people it benefits are those with other assets to pay their bills. A foreclosure isn't imminent if you have other assets, so the argument about the banks losing either way is a fallacy.

The argument that banks net less after foreclosure than they do in a short sale is an oft-repeated lie. I've benefitted from it personally - the shorts I've purchased closed at probably at least 25% less than a retail buyer would pay for the same house, in the same condition. Retail buyers can't wait a year to move, and both of the shorts I purchased took a full year to close. In my state, the banks could have put those owners out in six months and gotten full retail for them. The sellers ended up with their credit completely smeared, (a year of late payments is every bit as bad as a quick foreclosure).

Winners in the deal? Well, me, and the agent on the other end of the deal. The agents in this thread keep speaking about "helping" people, short-sales don't help the seller, unless they're deadbeats with assets & there's no reason to help deadbeats.

I don't like the big banks a bit, but I do understand the worthless paper they wrote was stuffed into Fannie & Freddie, so heads we lose, tails they win, and your grand kids will be footing the bill for my capital gain.

You missed my point entirely, Steve. People with great income, great credit, perfect references & stable relationships aren't commonly renting rooms.

I'm not saying you should rent to the local person with no way to verify income- but I am saying I think you're taking things too far if you're calling ex's and doing some of the other suggestions in this thread. Those with great credit, great income, stacks of references & social stability aren't renting rooms from people..

They're homeowners.

Funny how it's only real-estate agents who think we "need" to extend the "tax cuts for deadbeats" act.

Christmas is over, find another way to rob the banks.

Respectfully, I have to call bs.

A few years back, when I got a (great) new job 2,000 miles away from my home, that was 80% on the road, I knew I needed to rent a room - I wasn't going to be there much, didn't want to deal with furnishings & utilities and wasn't able to spend $100 per night for a hotel room.

I rolled into Phoenix on a Wednesday morning, picked up my company car, worked a full day, then started looking for rooms at 3pm- by 5pm I had a roommate, and by 8 pm I was assembling my futon. The futon was a tactical error, btw.. My back still hurts years later. Though I had "planned" my move for months in advance, I wasn't going to rent a room from someone I had never met, and no one is going to "hold" a room for a month for someone *theyve* never met.

Room-mate is a transient situation - and all this talk of calling ex's, pulling credit & digging even *further* into a person's background is kinda creepy. I wouldnt have rented from anyone who wanted to pull more than a credit & background check - and frankly, I'd have been hesitant to even give my soc to a roommate who could be a weirdo. The potential roommate has risk here as well, which most posters here have forgotten.

I was the bestest roommate ever- my roommate at the time frequently commented that he could have rented "my" room out to someone else as well, cause I was never there.

To the op, if you can't deal with the creepy/awkwardness of having a stranger in your house, you shouldn't be renting rooms out. It's guaranteed drama. It rarely ends well. Nature of the beast.

It's a room-mate situation, those are always unstable - nature of the beast. Stable people rent the whole apartment/house. A credit/eviction check is always a good idea, but those shouldn't take that long to run- I can get them from my broker anytime during business hours.

Stable roommate is an oxymoron, just like "military intelligence".

The biggest one will be "lender overlays" - rules that *arent* fha's that the bigger banks will impose.

My local bank had a big sign over the entrance touting their "investor loans" - when I inquired about rates, I was told they would only write investor loans for homes at least *thirty miles* from your primary residence. !?!

You will run into all kinds of weird & wacky rules. They may not want to count the income from your paid off rental if it hasn't been occupied by tenants for xx months.

Every bank will give you different rules & what your told when you apply may be different than what the underwriter will accept.

In my area, we have a local credit union that gives great rates & has underwriters who you can actually talk to if you want. They're in the building, not 500 miles away, and they answer their phones.

I'd network with others in your local area to find the banks that actually try to close deals. After dealing with my credit union, I'd never borrow from a mega-bank again. The difference in how smoothly things went was completely different than my experience with Chase.

No, you can own a rental and qualify for FHA, but you need to declare that the purchased home is going to be your primary home. You may have to jump through a few hoops. No need to delay the probate.