All Forum Posts by: Stan Hill

I dig your candor.  ;)

I'm not sure how your lease reads. In Texas, ours is an "as-is" rental, and we give the tenant two days to get back to us on any repairs needed. After that, it's as-is. I suspect many if not most of your repair requests are items that have been there since they moved in. They call you as they spot these "issues".

Secondly, this is why I don't like management companies. The management companies I've talked to make a small profit on repairs needed. So there's an incentive for them to have higher repair costs.

Have you considered self-management? If not, please do. You'll save money. You'll be in control. You having a financial interest, your costs will go down.

No offense to all the good people in property management here.

My two cents' worth.

I think it depends on the tenant. If they pay their rent on time and are generally not trouble, I would explain to them I will do them a courtesy and change the locks.

Keep any locks your remove for further use later. At some point, you'll have enough locks that you'll rarely have to buy any. We keep the original packages and put locks being removed neatly into the packages the new locks come in. 

Property inspector.

Great reply! We've been telling our son to start out with something four units or less. Keep the down payment low, start getting some rental income, then later use the income to qualify for another piece of property. Theoretically, a person could buy another MF property every few years.

I like the property you posted. Just out of curiosity, what's an estimate on what each would rent for?

I am not an attorney, but will comment anyway. First off, assuming you're not an engineer in the area of basement flooding, I'm not sure how you should have known. You disclosed what you knew. I believe they're just hoping you're lying and afraid. Second, they got an inspection done. Their beef should be with their inspector. If he knew about a disclosed water issue, he should have and possibly did recommend they get an engineer involved. I've had this happen on several properties we've bought. That's part of the inspector's role.

There is always risk with purchasing real estate. It sounds to me like you acted in good faith. They're looking to get someone, anyone to pay for the risk they took that turned out badly for them.

THEY will have to pay a lot of money to an attorney to pursue this. I would do anything possible to make them accumulate for attorney's fees.

I actually had a situation similar to this- in reverse. We had some foundation work done. It was a disaster. We got a lawyer. Both parties postured. We decided it wasn't worth the risk, dropped it and moved on.

This is an interesting situation. I hope you keep us all posted. Best of luck to you!

I use TurboTax. I plug in the information and TurboTax put my rental business stuff into schedule E. No word from the IRS thus far. That said, our rental business is not our SOLE business. I hope you can stay on schedule E, as we pay no self-employment tax on that income.

I got the quote from Gene Simmons. Pretty basic quote, though. Certainly more than one person could have said it. At any rate, it's one of my all-time favorites. Congrats on doing so well. Keep going! 

I've found every county I've searched for online. I usually do a search for "XXX county tax lien auction" or something like that. I live in the DFW area. Most counties near me have everything online. One small county has auctions less often and it appears I'll have to make human contact to get a list.

That said, I'm not sure if you're talking about tax liens or foreclosure auctions. These are separate events.

"The harder I worked, the luckier I got."

--Gene Simmons