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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. My biggest concern is that in MD you can't discriminate on criminal history or section 8 status. I do NOT want section 8 renters in here; this is my first house, I've owned it for 9 years and put a bunch of work into it, so I don't want trashy people destroying it. I'm sure I'll get heat for that, but I don't care. Every place I've lived that has had section 8 renters in the community you could tell which house was theirs.
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May 10, 2013 02:36
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 16:26 |
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Authentic You posted:Raise the rent. Yeah, definitely. Rents in the neighborhood go for $1600-1700, so I'll probably err on the higher side. I also assume most Section 8 applicants have lovely credit, so I can always deny them based on that. No schools close by, thank god, so I don't have to worry about college kids. Dazzleberries posted:Have a good lease with strong penalties if they are late, even a day late. Gotta love MD; state law says it's not late until 10 days after the first of the month, can you believe that?
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May 11, 2013 00:08
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DNova posted:You have to be ridiculously careful with how you reject tenants. I know; I worked at a company that did background checks for multifamily properties for years. Most big firms at the time just did a 3:1 income: rent ratio and made sure you hadn't ended up in landlord tenant court. This company had a proprietary score it sold that did a lot of what TouchyMcFeely describes, but in way more detail. It generally keeps you compliant with Fair Housing laws.
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May 11, 2013 04:07
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KaiserBen posted:Has anyone owned rental property in the DC area? Wondering how bad DC landlord-tenant laws are and how expensive it ends up being to keep the place up. MD, DC or VA?
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May 16, 2013 13:16
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KaiserBen posted:All three. I'm in VA, but looking at jobs on the MD side as well, and a few in the city proper. I'd prefer VA, since I know the law on this side of the river, but there's not too good rental property in the suburban sprawl that makes up this side of the Potomac. In MD the law is heavily tilted towards the tenant. My realtor told me it can take 4-6 months to get someone out if they need to be evicted.
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May 17, 2013 00:33
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Aquatic Giraffe posted:We don't want to get into legal/credit trouble because of some dumbass tenant. This is definitely a thing you need to look into when buying a rental property. THAT is really good advice. Thank you.
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May 19, 2013 16:14
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So the property management company I'm using got an application and sent me the signed lease a few days ago. I ran their names through Maryland's court case look up and there are a lot of hits for judgements and liens. However, I don't have their credit report so I can't see their past addresses. Hopefully it's different people (their names are not uncommon) but I guess we'll see. I move in 2 weeks. This sucks.
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Aug 30, 2013 02:15
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Ack, totally forgot that I had posted. I brought the court case look up to the management company's attention and made them run each address against the addresses on the credit reports. None of them matched, according to them. The names are not uncommon but not particularly common either, so I'll take their word for it that these are different people. timpanihilistic, I worked for Saferent for 2 years (in sales) from like 2004-2006. I probably know more about background checks than my property managers do 
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Sep 6, 2013 22:18
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Whelp, the renters already broke the washer and dryer (on the same day, no less!) and haven't paid October's rent yet. Winning!
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Oct 7, 2013 23:16
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I have to double check the lease but I'm pretty sure it's a "you break it, you fix it" situation. Unfortunately, it might not be possible to prove that they broke it. I suspect they overloaded them (because I also suspect they have 10 people living there) but I'm waiting from a response on the maintenance guy who actually examined them.
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Oct 8, 2013 11:58
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 16:26 |
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I've got a new one from my renters! The electric bill is too high! Like I'm coming in and changing the thermostat every night specifically to gently caress with their electric bill. They don't speak English, so I'm sure they haven't noticed the fact that the thermostat is fully programmable, so they're probably leaving the heat on at 75 all day long. Either that, or they're running a laundry service out of the house. That wouldn't surprise me.
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Dec 31, 2013 13:21
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