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TheLizard posted:I'm moving soon and don't want to sell my place, so I'm going to be a landlord soon enough. DC area; my realtor takes the first month rent and 7% commission each month. This seems to be standard in the area. Raise the rent. My friend's parents own a rental duplex not far from me, and were renting it for what was a pretty drat good deal for the nice neighborhood it's in. When they were looking for new tenants, they'd get a shitton of inquiries about whether they accepted Section 8 (not sure about how Section 8 discrimination works in PA) and lots of low-quality applicants in general, so they just arbitrarily raised the rent by a few hundred a month. After that, only folks inquiring were quiet grad students, young professionals, and well-to-do young families. Also, don't ever rent to undergrads. Ever. My downstairs neighbor is one of my landlord's maintenance guys, and oh god the stories he tells.
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May 10, 2013 03:10
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^^That sounds like a nightmare.Bloodnose posted:Am I a weirdly easy tenant? Are there that many people out there who make trouble for property owners and cost them crazy amounts of money and make renting unprofitable? Is it because I rent in newer buildings that don't require expensive upkeep? My current building is over a century old, but well-maintained. It got a new roof recently, but that had nothing to do with lovely tenants. Otherwise, with us replacing a pack of slobby college kids, all units in the building are occupied by easy-going, long-term tenants (I plan to stay here a while), I'd imagine it would be a nice building to maintain. Maintenance guy has some fun stories about the previous batches of tenants in my unit. Like them not knowing how to use a thermostat. My dad keeps encouraging me to buy a house here (even though I'm loving broke), and that the way to do it is to buy some hulking Victorian that's been chopped up into apartments so that I could have built-in tenants to pay down the mortgage, and then boot them out one by one as reabsorb the divided units and restore the house to its former glory. I mean, I want a cool old house, but I don't know if I want to deal with tenants while trying to restore it. 
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May 13, 2013 17:36
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Isentropy posted:In the city that I'm in, the Victorians sit on prime condo/apartment land, but cannot be redeveloped due to heritage rules. What many people have done is divide them up and rent them to undergrads. In a few years, they are so beyond repair that they lose the heritage status and the owner can do whatever they want with the property. Maybe this is what your dad wants? Quite the opposite, actually. My dad builds houses on the side (he's in commercial real estate development), including Getting a house with rentable units would just make it easier to afford (and a better project - my dad LOVES projects and I think he's trying to live vicariously through me and my hypothetical house).
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May 17, 2013 17:56
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Peven Stan posted:You know renting to undergrads is bad when i took out all the trash and swept and wiped my unit down during moveout and the maintenance guy loving hugged me because nobody in my building had ever done that for him. Aquatic Giraffe posted:If you do rent to undergrads, have a party clause in your lease. Ours says no gatherings of more than 10 people. They will ignore it and still have parties, but if they clean up well you'll never find out. If they ruin the place, you can hammer their rear end for lease violations. The legality of this may vary by state so you might want to check. Probably a good idea, even if just to enforce it in case things get out of hand. Like, hosting a big Thanksgiving for all your classmates that couldn't get home? Awesome! Raging kegger where windows and floorboards get broken and the cops and fire department gets called? Yeah... ANMAN posted:In some states there are certain thresholds that can be triggered when you remodel a house. This, pretty much. And I probably meant retaining old zoning in some cases, not building code - the building code stuff was namely getting away with the single-paned windows, and the multiple wood-burning fireplaces (which might be a zoning thing), and probably something about window:wall ratio or something. You can't do that poo poo with new houses. Otherwise, the construction was all nice and modern with proper insulation and a foundation (the house originally had no foundation and was single-wall construction, like literally, plaster and shingles mounted onto opposite sides of the same boards). As for zoning issues, the remodel enabled us to keep the house on its original footprint up in the corner of the property. Tearing down and rebuilding would have reset the zoning, requiring us to place the house in the middle of the lot and on top of my great grandmother's mature garden, which includes an absolutely giant and beautiful cutleaf maple, and that was unacceptable. Oh, and we would have had to reduce the number of stories from four to two with new construction. My dad got away with a lot of poo poo, and the town council still hates him 15 years later.
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May 24, 2013 00:10
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