We rent a home. We have around six months left on the lease of a home we've been renting for 3.5 years. Until last summer, we would get letters every now and then from realtors that wanted to let our landlord know they wanted to help him sell the house we live in. No big deal. However, like most areas of the country at the moment, ours has a big shortage of homes available for sale. In the last few months, agents from various real estate agencies in our area have really ramped up their efforts to get our landlord to sell the property. They send letters with pictures of our house (to include our vehicles in the driveway.) They stand in the street and discuss the property at length. They park their vehicles with company logos in front of the house and take pictures. I've even had them knock on the door to ask how long is left on my lease because a neighbor told them the house was a rental (after she pretended she thought I was the owner and then let it slip about the conversation with the neighbor.) Our landlord lives overseas. Our dealings with him are all through a property manager who is also a realtor. I asked her recently if she thought he was going to sell and she said he has expressed no interest in selling and that she anticipated that if we wanted to continue renting, he'd have no problem renewing the lease. I told her about the increasing activity and she just kind of waved it off and mentioned the crazy market. She did say that as long as they weren't on the property, there's not much I could do. This is all very frustrating. I just want to sit in my home without looking out of the window to see someone taking pictures, or bring in my groceries and go check my mail without dodging the real estate feeding frenzy. It sounds crazy but all of this is giving ME anxiety about the housing market even though I have no intentions of trying to buy or find another place to rent right now. It's honestly making me feel paranoid that he's maybe going to sell the house even though he hasn't said anything and I will have to scramble to find somewhere comparable to live. If I hear my kids say, "Mom! Someone's taking pictures of the house again," I'm going to lose it.

Just curious since I've barely ventured out of Burbank for a year now and I'm wondering what the rest of LA is like.

"For Rent" signs are everywhere, furniture is piling up on the sidewalks, etc. What's it been like in your neighborhood?

Hi there! i live alone in a One bedroom in law suite in a character home. I just discovered that the flooring near the bathtub is rather, soft and unstable. We all know this means gross water damage and mould. my landlords are nice, reasonable people and i am going to bring this to their attention in the morning. I already suspect that there needs to be major renovations to this washroom which will render it un-useable for some time. What are my rights? Can the landlords simply renovict me? What am i entitled to? Ideally i would like to stay in this suite after some repairs. Please help me good people of reddit!

As stated above, the apartment I moved into flooded the first week I moved in. It was the 2nd load of laundry I did since moving in, and the hose to the wall somehow came out. The plumber who came to fix it said it wasn’t installed properly and we shouldn’t have to pay for shit. Are we at fault for anything ?

Edit: Located in BC

Edit 2: We were NOT at cause at all, the washer didn’t move substantially if at all, it is in an enclosed closet which has gaps on either side of 6” or so. The hose that drains water was only a few inches deep into the drain and wasn’t clamped in properly. The plumber said it was only a matter of time until this happened and to contact strata for the info of the plumber who installed it as they are at fault.

Edit 3: To everyone saying I should have renters insurance, yes, I know. Lesson learned. But none of our contents were damaged so it wouldn’t have helped our situation.

Guess who has a set of keys to your apartment.

Make sure to consider this in your SHTF strategy, especially when your landlord lives nearby.

Backstory:
My sister lives in a multi apartment house in one of the top floors. The landlord lives on the first floor. Recently there was a flooding on the street and the water entered the first floor apartment. When my sister got home from work, her landlord had already entered her apartment to use the shower and bathroom. To top it off, the landlord insisted on spending the night on her couch until things got sorted out downstairs. The landlord left eventually because his insurance called and said they would pay a hotel.

My sister doesn't feel safe now because the landlord still has the keys and proofed he doesn't hesitate to enter other people's homes without any notice.

I'm definitely going to buy a new door lock for when desaster strikes just to keep my landlord out. My door already got an additional deadbolt but my landlord also got the keys for that one :/

EDIT:
We live in Germany. Yes, a landlord cannot legally enter the apartment without notice. I think the only exception is an emergency, e.g. fire and immediate danger in/to the respective unit. The landlord apparently only owns 2 apartments in the builing - his and my sister's. That's why he went into her apartment. It's also his furniture in it - he used this as an argument to justify using the couch for the night. My sister did threaten to call the police if he didn't leave. He then suggested to discuss things later, he needed to make a phone call first. That call apparently was with his insurance company because afterwards he said he'd go to a hotel provided by the insurance. We don't really know how long he's been in the apartment until my sister got home - but my sister said it did look like he was already settled in for the evening. Oh and a short time after he left a food delivery guy showed up and left the order at the door - according to the receipt the order was placed about 1.5 hours earlier. That doesn't prove he was in the apartment since then, but it very well could be. This whole thing really creeped her and our family out, my parents being beyond worried. Especially that he tried to guilt trip her with the furniture argument. My dad already talked to a lawyer. We're also searching for a new apartment - in the meantime my sister is staying at a friend's place. We all thought we could spend easter in peace.

I didn't want this to be

Hello, I am a 23M who just purchased a multi unit property (my first) that is set to close June 1. I am doing an owner occupant house hacking thing, but the owners unit is currently under lease until mid August. Ideally, I want to move in before then, so I am looking at ideas for incentivizing the current tenants to move out.

So far, I have thought about:

• cash incentive
• pro rating rent if lease broken (gives them flexibility to move out whenever.)

Am I missing anything? I would appreciate the help!

Thanks, Pete

Any other parents feel renter’s guilt? I’m not looking forward to buying a home and most days I don’t want to. BUT I have a 2 year old and a 10 year old step child so I feel like I have to. Our school district is OK but there is better we are looking into. We could continue to rent or buy In our desired area. I feel guilt about not wanting to buy a house. Do I “owe it” to my children to own a home? We found a beautiful townhome with a backyard and front yard and would love to rent it for the family but at the price we could technically buy around the corner with another $150... but I don’t want the responsibility or expenses of home ownership!

Anyone else experiencing/experienced this?

https://www.fox2detroit.com/news/man-builds-poop-wall-in-washtenaw-county-after-dispute-with-neighbor

I'd like to preface this by saying we (the renters) were NOT the ones to call the news or even really complain about it -- we thought the poop wall was a normal farm thing until the news showed up on Tuesday to tell us otherwise!!

EDIT: Sorry for the late replies! Our Internet went out because of the rain most of the evening yesterday. If I missed any, please feel free to comment again and I'll try to address everyone!

Living in a fairly decent hotel, clean, rent is $1200 includes everything. Coming July, they’re throwing about 10 of us out so to get nightly tourist money. Kind of shocked. At least they are giving us 90 days. I’m going to write a sincere letter saying it’s a real hardship to move to a place with no qualifying income (using unemployment and credit to get by). Feeling like I’m dying, too much stress and insecurity. I won’t be on the streets, I’ll be “gone” if you get my drift. I think this is a really rotten thing for the mgt. to do. I”m going to call the county housing dept. to see if monthly hotel renters have any rights. (Oregon) State voted for rent control, but does that apply to hotels? No evictions without cause. I haven’t had a home of my own in 2 years now, and it’s really wearing me out. Been unemployed that long.

Renter is moving out in a month. They've been a really good renter for 2.5 years and he recently gave me their notice. I then told him I would start showing the place in a couple weeks and it was no issue. I continually asked them which day would work best for their schedule and they eventually said Thursday (today) and set up 12 showings. Today I get a message saying they are uncomfortable having people in the home while their stuff is still in there and that they've never seen this practice before. I come from a family a rentals and this seems like common practice but I just looked through my contract and I actually don't have language about showing the apartment while they are still living there. How should I proceed? I hate the idea of cancelling and missing out on rent trying to show rent it last minute.
EDIT: So two things, the lease does have an entry clause stating I can enter the house for "any other reasonable business purposes while Resident is present in the Premises" which renting out the home would be a reasonable business purpose. The other item in the lease is that the tenant wants to move out May 15 but the lease states the move out period needs to be a full calendar month and not pro rated. I don't want to hang this over the tenant since I verbally communicated the move out date is fine.
I sent a reasonable response to the tenant so if they still are uncomfortable, I'll have to do a virtual tour and potentially have the tenant agree to let the future tenant see the place before they move out prior to signing. That way it's only one person and not 12 going through the place. Also, I plan on including specific language in my next contract that specifically spell out allowing me to show the apartment while still occupied during the tenant's last month.

(Note: This is a cross post - I also posted this in r/Tenant)

My background: My wife and I own 3 buildings, with 2 apartments in each. We have a property manager who handles everything for us. We bought our first building in 2008, and our last in 2011, and did all our own management until around late 2012 IIRC.

So here's a nightmare scenario for you to consider if you happen to have let your renters insurance lapse, or decided you didn't need it to begin with.

Today, while tenants in both units were out, a pipe burst on the 2nd floor unit, inside the walls.

The water damaged the walls and floors upstairs a little but in the downstairs unit, the ceiling is collapsing, the walls are destroyed, as are the floors, and the water has made it all the way to the basement at this point.

Our tenants and our PM are awesome - they called her soon as they got home, and she rushed over there with her husband, a shop back and some tools, to get the water shut off and to start draining the standing water.

Nevertheless - neither unit can stay in the apartment tonight. The upstairs tenants may be able to return tomorrow - the downstairs is definitely gonna be out for a while while mitigation/repairs take place.

So - what are the financial and time impacts here to all parties?

Well - the tenants need to find somewhere to stay. Fortunately they both have family close by. If they didn't, their renters insurance should cover temporary relocation costs. My policy does not.

The tenants were very lucky in another regard - looks like property damage was extremely minor - a few towels from what I understand. That's good - but if the situation was worse - the renters insurance would cover their losses. My policy would not. My policy covers damage to the building.

Edit: Just wanted to thank everyone for the awards and positive feedback. I'm glad people find this guide helpful! Please don't hesitate to PM me if you want to ask me anything about apartment hunting and the rental process in Toronto!

My partner and I finally decided to find a place to move in, and this is both of our first time doing apartment hunting in Toronto. We just got approved for our dream place!

I did extensive research into typical requirements of documentation and the whole process, but there were just still so many questions that I couldn't find any answers to, presumably because they were just so silly or so basic that no one asked about it, but to complete newbies like us, those unanswered questions really confused us.

In this post, I'm going to provide a guide catered to apartment hunting in Toronto that will hopefully help out future newbies like us by answering questions that they might not find answers to easily.

The information in this guide is based on our experiences with 5 different places we viewed.

Quick summary of our search criteria:

• $2000 Max
• 2 bedrooms, 1 bath (we wouldn't mind more if it was within the budget)
• Due to the above two criteria, our search mostly involved purpose-built rentals (so no condo)
  • Note: From what I've read, the application process for PBRs seem to be really different compared to that for condos, especially in terms of documents required.
  • What is a purpose-built rental? Here's my sketchy (but hopefully good enough explanation: Purpose-built rentals are basically buildings that are purposely built for renting out the units. The biggest difference between PBRs and condos is that you can't buy a unit in a PBR the way you can in a condo. I think condo units are all owned by different individuals whereas an entire PBR building is usually owned by one company.
• Had to be within 20 minutes of walking distance to a subway or GO train station, a Canada Post office, and a major grocery store (e.g. Longo's, No Frills, Walmart etc)
• The second bedroom had to be bigger than 10' x 10', like 9' x 11' is good but 8' x 10' is not good. I'm a professional audio engineer and a room smaller than 10' x 10' is just incredibly hard to treat acoustically.
• Had to include at least heat and water
• Had to have a guaranteed parking spot (extra fee is okay)
• Had to have at least on-site laundry

Our criteria should give you a good idea how relevant this guide would be to your search!

Search

I live in a small development. Half own half are the apartment renters. We are out side city limits so our trash removal is with dumpsters. The apartment owner pays for one the home owners pay for the other and the renters are horrible about filling theirs up at a ridiculous speed and then moving to ours (the homeowners). Our trash is removed every Thursday morning and today (Saturday) when i went to take out my trash the renters (idk who) had thrown an entire bed lamp and fan into the owners completely filling it up. This is now the second week i haven't been able to throw my garbage away and the slum lord wont do anything about it. The current owners and myself split the bill for a dumpster i basically cannot use and im to the point of putting up signs saying no renters trash. Would i be the asshole for posting a sign that basically tells the renters to leave our dumpster alone?

I work primarily with sellers so I'm soing pretty good right now all things considered. That said, I don't shoo away buyers or renters. I'm the only agent in my Coldwell Banker office that will even handle office lease leads.

Recently inventory for buying and renting has been absurdly low. I have a handful of buyers and renters I've been working with over the past two or three months and many are finally ready to throw in the towel.

Countless showings, numerous offers and applications. Renters getting pre qualified because I can't find them a rental only for me to not be able to land them a house for sale.

This market is just too unforgiving for buyers and now many of them are saying they want to wait a year or more now until things clear up. I even had a buyer client from California decide to renew their lease last week than deal with the dfw market any longer.

My buyer pipeline for when this cools down will be full so that's nice but very frustrating.

Meanwhile my sellers are practically showering in offers.

I'm renting a room out of a house, 165/week, through an agent (but found it on flatmates.com.au). On the tenancy application form it tells me to write down the bond. The agent tells me that the bond is 28 days of rent, which should be 660, but she tells me its 720. This is the first thing I'm not sure about and I'm worried asking her about this will decrease my chances of getting the place.

Secondly, because of my situation I'm unable to save up enough (not even 3 months), and have to get out soon. I have JUST enough to pay for the bond in my bank balance, with a job I just started a month ago. I want to apply as soon as possible before someone else snatches the place, but if the bond is 720 and I show my balance that has 730, there's no way in hell someone would accept that. I could wait until my payday (this Thursday) to up my balance a little more, but I'm still worried that that's too late because anyone else could have applied by then.

So should I a) ask the agent about the bond? and b) Apply now with just barely enough.