Useless Conversation

[Torinak]

The real estate market is SERIOUSLY overpriced just about everywhere, largely because all those suckers who had to get foreclosed on in the crash had their houses bought up for pennies on the dollar by some asshole with enough money to wait out the market, or who turned it into a rental for 1.5X what it should be renting for in its location.

It's insane how this works.  We bought a second house and decided to rent out our previous house.  Our mortgage (including taxes and everything) is just under $800, we rented it out last year for $1500 a month.  That tenant left and our current tenant is paying $1600  a month and the number of replies we got (and how quickly) means that I'm sure we can up it to $1700 when we have a new tenant come in.  My wife has talked about wondering if we'd get $100k cash profit if we sold it based on sales going on around us but the profit we are making from rent (plus them paying the house off for us) makes it really hard for me to want to sell it.

I'm glad you enjoy your second job (landlord). I hope you don't end up with marginal or bad tenants who end up trashing the place. I've heard far too many horror stories about just how much work it is to be a landlord, and how often the rental property ends up damaged to the point where you end up losing money, even from "good" tenants.

If you're super-handy with everything, like fixing random things at all hours of the day and night, and live close enough to the rental property to do so, then more power to you. Me, I'll just buy REITs for real estate exposure beyond my house.

[Trippy]

You can also just hire somebody/a company to manage it for you.

[Torinak]

You can also just hire somebody/a company to manage it for you.

You can. They don't make costs from bad tenants go away, or ensure due diligence on repair and maintenance work. Their cut can be big enough to make it not worth doing (i.e., can just about cover mortgage and have to assume significant capital appreciation to make the property worthwhile).

Yes, it's possible to make money from real estate rental with the right renters in the right area. It's just too high-risk and labor-intensive for me to bother with, compared to the alternatives. I might feel differently if I had a former house I couldn't sell.

[Merusk]

Management companies are a scam. They only make sense if you're running over 10-15 leases on non-marginal properties and don't care enough about your reputation with your tenants. Most apartments are run by management companies, so that gives you the bar for the "high quality" service they provide.

That's what I've been told, at least.

[Selby]

Yes, it's possible to make money from real estate rental with the right renters in the right area.

Yup.  College towns and the west coast big metro areas are some of the few places you can do very little and always have tenants and have good income (especially the bay area CA & Seattle).  Granted, you really are likely going to have people damage the shit out of your house\property in these areas too, so that has to be factored in.

[Samwise]

The higher the value of the land you're sitting on, the less significant the cost of upkeep relative to what you can rent it for.  My back-of-envelope figures suggest that if I rented my home out for 10 years and at the end of it needed to demolish the entire structure and rebuild it from scratch, I'd come out ahead.

Mind you, being a landlord in SF has its own complexities that I want no part of.  I'm tremendously happy to just be my own landlord and nobody else's.

[KallDrexx]

I'm glad you enjoy your second job (landlord). I hope you don't end up with marginal or bad tenants who end up trashing the place. I've heard far too many horror stories about just how much work it is to be a landlord, and how often the rental property ends up damaged to the point where you end up losing money, even from "good" tenants.

If you're super-handy with everything, like fixing random things at all hours of the day and night, and live close enough to the rental property to do so, then more power to you. Me, I'll just buy REITs for real estate exposure beyond my house.

Yep, and we do worry about that because we have heard all the stories from people we know that rent out their place (but also have heard the good ones as well). 

Our last tenant was perfect, outside of the two issues that arose (one plumbing and one time the stove died) we didn't hear a peep from the tenant and got all of our checks on time.  Upon inspection the house looked perfect outside of some really really minor stuff. 

It was the house we lived in for the past 4 years prior to us moving out, so the house itself is in good shape.  We only moved out cause my wife's grandparents needed to sell their house, and it was the opportunity (for a crazy good price) to get an acre of property with no neighbors, but still right near society (not BFE).  The rental house is in a neighborhood with extremely rising prices, so the liklyhood that we'll be able to sell it for a really really good profit in a year or two is real (especially since it's right next to a high school and elementary school in a 10/10 school system.

[Merusk]

I don't know what you guys linked in the Silicon Valley thread but it's flagging as porn on Bitdefender. Assholes. :p

[MahrinSkel]

Could have been the references to the horse breeding scene, or if it is only recent then the discussions of Jared's surprising romantic success.

Or maybe Bitdefender is crappy software that thinks that any page that discusses plural equine phallus (phallusi? Phalluses?) must be nasty. Dunno, on the rare occasions I've gotten stuck behind filters, my first response is to figure out how to bypass them.

--Dave

[Sky]

Some year I'll learn to clean the gutters (eaves troughs for you furriners) before they overflow with the first hard rain. Honestly didn't think they were bad this year, I did them late in the fall and there was no overflow all spring.

I was wrong.

Basement and three windows flooded, an hour later the problem is mostly temporarily fixed.

edit: people with oak trees are assholes (oaks drop their leaves months later than all other deciduous trees)

[Chimpy]

Have you tried putts big guards on them?

[Merusk]

Gutter guards are a worthwhile investment. They've kept my gutters clear and I've got lots of trees to deal with.

[Sky]

I have them on a short run that dumps into an underground pipe, since I can't easily clean that out. Looks like this is the year to add them to the rest of the gutters.

[apocrypha]

We use these things called gutter hedgehogs on ours, they're like a long bottle brush that lays in the guttering. Cheaper than the guards and seem to clog up less with leaves. Our gutters are too high up for us to get to, 10m or so, which doesn't sound like a lot but it's double the height of any ladder I'm prepared to climb up.

[Sky]

Actually, cleaning the gutters doesn't bother me at all. I've done tons of roof work, from building/re-shingling to just shoveling snow or breaking up ice dams. And my house is a very low 1 story, the old lady still freaks out when I hop off the roof to the ground (and I caught an earfull when I did a flip off the roof into a snowbank while she was home).

Anyway, it takes me maybe 15-30 minutes depending on how much I hang out and enjoy the view.

My main concern with gutter guards is heavy rains will shoot right over the top because I have shallow eaves. A couple particularly bad years I've installed some vertical plastic diverters in trouble spots to prevent that.

[Chimpy]

A lot of the guards now are more like screens that don't inhibit water flow, they just keep debris out.

[WayAbvPar]

edit: people with oak trees are assholes (oaks drop their leaves months later than all other deciduous trees)

We have a massive oak in our front yard, and I pray for frequent windstorms in the fall to blow the goddamned leaves out of my yard 

[Mandella]

Or the lovely water oaks surrounding our house and yard that shed leaves all fucking summer long!

Apparently nobody told them about the whole wait for autumn thing.

I have to shovel the pool daily, and the gutters monthly. Looking into the gutter guard thing, but having an odd amount of trouble finding ones that fit right. And won't just end up covered with water oak leaves too.

[WayAbvPar]

I would love to get the gutter guards as well, but there are other projects that are more pressing. I really need to bink a big poker tourney or 10.

[Sky]

I just used the cheap ones from Lowe's, they're less than good and don't fit very well. But they've done the job of keeping stuff out of that one difficult section. Since they're a) cheap and b) easy to get, I'll probably try them along a couple more sections this year. On the other hand, they don't hold up well at all so maybe I should spend more for better.

I do have both pines and maples, so I can't go with the mesh that seems popular, as it's weak points are maple seeds and pine needles.

[Rasix]

LOL water issues.  It was only 111 both days this weekend.  Such brisk weather for this time of year.

Pros: Pool was at 83-85 degrees.

Con: Got stung by a wasp. Doing anything was a lot of effort in sweating and being broiled alive.

Pros: Wasp is dead.  Not allergic to wasps. 

[Trippy]

Pros: Wasp is dead.  Not allergic to wasps. 

You might be now

[schild]

Ahhhhhh, the irony of the most evil fucking thing on earth.

[Rasix]

Bummer.  I guess there's only one way to find out. 

[Soln]

time: 5:21 AM
location: 20 feet up a Doug Fir, maybe the same distance from our bedroom window
suspects: one raccoon (large, non-descript), the other a smaller raccoon (maybe horny, or mad, or both, you know how it is sometimes)
incident: sustained screaming, fighting, cooing, some kind of gurgling and then largest suspect falling out the tree.  Suspects get up, gives us the bird, wanders off in the backyard followed by second suspect. 

[HaemishM]

That's the POWER OF LOVE! 

[calapine]

So it turns out that Monthy Pyhton and the Holy Grail was a historically accurate documentary.










http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2016/05/violent-rabbit-illustrations-found-in-the-margins-of-medieval-manuscripts/

[Selby]

My house is 3 stories tall and surrounded by dozens of 75-100 foot tall trees of varying species (including the ones I've been planting). Gutter guards are my friends, I haven't had to clean gutters since. Although my leaf blower does get a workout 6 months of the year...

[Sky]

Small animal news updates? Sure!

So we've had skunks living in the woods behind us as long as I've lived here. Lovely genetic set, mostly cream colored, mind they own bidness. We like 'em. Part of the squirrel ecosystem: crazy neighbor lady feeds the goddamned squirrels (why), who bury the nuts in my huge lawn, skunks root out the nuts at night.

Years ago there was a black and white feral cat that would come around in heat and get Bart worked up. We would tease Bart about his girlfriend. Now he thinks skunks are that cat, so we tease him about his stinky girlfriends. Odin help us if he gets out at night, I swear he will try to bang one in a tragic reverse Pepe LePew incident.

Anyway.

Currently there is a turf war going on in the woods. This in no way has led to a running series of jokes about #blackandwhitelivesmatter or gang violence. It has definitely led to an occasional hasty closing of the back windows. Only twice so far has a skirmish occurred in the yard, to date no innocents have been struck down.

[Signe]

Nothing crazier sounding than a female fox yelling for her hubby to come home.  This happens all the time.  The male foxes around here must all be hound dogs.

[Sky]

We had a fox family in the woods a few years back. I thought a woman was being stabbed to death.

[apocrypha]

I got woken up by an owl hooting right outside our window at 3am last night. We hear them regularly, there's definitely a pair of Tawny Owls, the male makes the most cartoony owl noise :)  And one of these summers I'm going to camp out in the garden and try to photograph the badgers that leave trails on our lawn.

[Soln]

We were convinced we had monkeys on meth around our house this Spring until we identified them (barred owls) from this clip:  Insane Owl Posse.  Take those noises, amplify them into wild hysterics, and you have our transient neighbors.

[Paelos]

I got woken up by an owl hooting right outside our window at 3am last night. We hear them regularly, there's definitely a pair of Tawny Owls, the male makes the most cartoony owl noise :)  And one of these summers I'm going to camp out in the garden and try to photograph the badgers that leave trails on our lawn.

We have some sort of owl out in our yard here in the city. It's never easy to see, but we got one picture of it on a ledge once. He makes some noise, but we've noticed the squirrels are all gone.

[Merusk]

We've got a great horned owl around here. I haven't found the next but I've heard it at night and saw it sitting on my roof one. Damn thing flew off before I even thought to get a picture.

Oddly we have a pretty large hawk in the area, too. I guess since they're opposite each other on the day cycle they don't compete, but I didn't think you'd find them nesting so close.