All Forum Posts by: Dorothy York

Agents can, and are obligated to represent their client's desires. It is entirely possible that the agent was conveying information that the seller has authorized her to share. Confidential information can be shared if the seller has authorized it. Unless someone on this forum has a copy of the contract, you are in not position to speak to the agency's competence.

In WI, you must hold a broker's license in order to manage other people's property. "Holding a broker's license" is a relative term. You only need one person in the company or group who actually has a broker's license. You can manage as many of your own properties as you want, no license required.

Welcome to the BP forum @Ernie V. 

Others have already given you good places to start exploring the BP site. Not sure how long you have lived in Milwaukee, but it is a place with many niche areas and is really a neighborhood by neighborhood evaluation. My suggestion would be to look up properties in your price range online and do some drive-bys to see what the neighborhoods look like.

Hi @Andrew Tyson

First and foremost, thank you for your service to securing our country. Welcome to BP and welcome home. There is invaluable information on this forum. Be careful, its addicting.

There is a local Meetup of BP members the last Saturday of each month, so watch the forum for details.

Unfortunately, bed bugs is quite an epidemic in Milwaukee right now. Very expensive to remedy and the city will issue you code violations to exterminate if tenants call to complain (even though they caused the problem). Orkin charged $1,200 to exterminate a duplex, which was discounted because one of the units was empty. That is the low cost remedy. The only "guaranteed" cure is a heat treatment that costs upwards of $3,000. If you have the problem in a multi-unit building, it will cost you quite a bit of your cash flow.

Now we, like most landlords, include the right to charge tenants for the problem. Unless you have a single family unit, good luck on identifying the culprit or collecting on the repairs.

I did the landlord class some years ago and thought it was really good information....and FREE. Doesn't get much better than that.

This is probably not the right topic for me to be weighing in on, but hey, here I am. Based upon my experience, a lot of people have management companies in place because they want the benefit of owning and renting properties without the headache. They want to communicate with the management company only, not have tenants escalate things to them or have screening companies contacting them personally for references. That is their prerogative. Many corporate management companies look up ownership and contact the listed owner directly for tenant reference...probably because people LIE about it.....A LOT. So making it harder for someone to look up your personal name and address as owner is not necessarily a bad thing.

One option is to use a PO Box for the LLC that provides a street address instead of the PO Box number. Can a real Sherlock still find you? Yes. But they have to consult multiple sources to do it.

I really liked the video and the story it tells. Its probably just my lack of familiarity with the website, but the screen shots didn't really look that different from the current site.

@Brie Schmidt

There is a section that is titled "account status" you will note that it says "installment", which means the seller decided to pay their taxes on an installment plan. The balance is what is left unpaid.

By the way, the city does not charge for new water meter replacements, but they will load unpaid water bills onto the tax bill if they are still delinquent when property tax bills are generated.

By all means, go with all of the good information you are getting from people on this forum who have been there, done that. But don't lay awake at night dreaming about this deal because my experience with multi unit owners in the Milwaukee-metro area is that they have unrealistic expectations about price of their properties. Add that he is a FSBO, and those expectations go even higher.

If you are a licensed realtor and member of the association, you can access these forms free in your Zipforms which comes with membership in the state realtors association.