All Forum Posts by: Steve Babiak

You need to understand the utility situation better IMO. Somebody just posted on another thread that their new tenant ran up the electric bill that the landlord pays; see it here:
http://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/52/topics/38578-new-tenants-electric-bill-sky-high

Tenants won't conserve utilities unless they bear the burden of paying for it.

I did this at the closing table. Call each utility company, seller drops service, and buyer signs up. Buyer should have made any advance arrangements with utility companies for deposit money that might be needed; typically this is not necessary if the buyer already has accounts with that utility company in good standing.

Looks like above link was moved; I found this one:
http://www.co.pueblo.co.us/pcchd/environmental/hazmat.aspx?id=308

Think more along the lines of an installment contract ...

If more people would switch to the Firefox browser, there would be less of that. Firefox highlights misspellings as words are typed (similar to how MS Word works).

And it's even more annoying when the post title is fouled up, because user's can't edit those once the post is made.

Some others that I find annoying are when people exchange homonyms for each other; some examples:

its v. it's
their v. there v. they're
to v. too v. two
here v. hear
no v. know

That last one is the most annoying, because there isn't so much similarity at all.

As for electric, look for 5 meters - one for each tenant, and one for the common areas (public lighting, fire alarms, maybe power for the central heater, etc).

But at least you should examine the set-up beforehand to determine whether utilities are landlord's bill or not.

Dustin has a good idea here. I have exceeded my quota of votes for the day, so I'll come back later to give Dustin my vote.

C'mon guys, sounds like you agreed with what I said - but no votes ...

Taking a second may not be an option. The lender likely will want to have this disclosed at the point in time when the buyer's application for the loan is made. And the borrower will then have a bigger monthly payment on the combined loans - thus possibly not qualifying for the loan.