Paying Tenants for Access
Hope you can help set realistic expectations regarding a potentially tricky situation. I am looking to buy a house that has what has been described as “hostile tenants”. The house itself is a good deal and I am including the price of dealing with these tenants in my overall cost/benefit analysis of the house purchase….
Hope you can help set realistic expectations regarding a potentially tricky situation. I am looking to buy a house that has what has been described as “hostile tenants”. The house itself is a good deal and I am including the price of dealing with these tenants in my overall cost/benefit analysis of the house purchase. Anyway, long story short, I would like to “incentivize” the tenants to cooperate with various activities, such as inspections, walk-throughs, etc that will require access to all of the apartments. The tenants are currently paying $1100 and $1200 a month in rent. What would be a reasonable amount to offer the tenants per visit, to make themselves or the apartment available for access by my inspectors, engineers, etc? I was thinking about $40 – $50 per visit, per apartment. Thoughts? Thanks!
You could have the seller put some of the sale profits in escrow to cover any lost rents and legal fees to evict the current tenants (say for 6 months)
This sounds like a terrible situation to voluntarily enter. First, if they are rent controlled and elderly you will be not be able to evict even if the laws say you can. It’s that simple. Second, will you be living in the same building during what will be proctracted and very hostile eviction proceedings? Have you factored into your analysis that your life will be hell during that period? Not to be melodramtic, I can think of a few cases where this has led to the death of either the tenant or the landlord.
You say they are already hostile and the eviction proceedings have not even begun. If I’m a tenant getting evicted, the hot water would never stop running in my apartment, night and day. The phone calls for heat violations would never stop, I’d get as many inspectors in there as possible to make your life as miserable as possible. Finally, I’m not even sure you can call them “hostile” because they won’t let you in their apartment as your plan is to evict them. Sounds like the sensible thing to do to me.
Hostile tenants are trouble, I would be inclined to make two offers, a higher one for the house delivered vacant, and a lower one for the house with the tenats in situ. Before you make plans to convert a two bedroom apartment into two studios, think about the sort of tenants that will be attracted to a studio apartment in a Brooklyn house and ask yourself whether you want to share your house with them. A nicely remodelled two bedroom apartment will attract a professional couple, a nicely remodelled studio may attract a younger person with an appetite for loud parties and/or a never ending stream of couch surfing friends. Also two tenants sharing one floor may be double the trouble if they decide they hate each other, especially if one is loud and the other isn’t.
Thanks, this was helpful (and not so helpful). As a first step, I am going to be a bit more aggressive with the sellers, since at his point it really is their issue. Supposedly they are motivated to sell the properties, hopefully that translates into getting me the access that I need.
‘on second thought, I wouldn’t cooperate with you if I was the tenant getting evicted for your duplex.”
“here is my eviction lawyer. Please take this $50 as a token of appreciation while I will look how to make a master bedroom out of your apartment”
Exactly. OP pretends this was about unreasonable tenants who won’t give the poor seller access, but it’s a different story entirely. How about $5000 for moving costs instead of $50?
When I sold my SF house (more stringent tenant laws than here,) I (*amicably*) bought her out with $10000. And her lease was going to up in 2 months, too.
(on second thought, I wouldn’t cooperate with you if I was the tenant getting evicted for your duplex. I think you should just assume you’ll have to evict them before you can start working with an architect/etc.)
I’m a renter, a socialist, a bleeding heart whatever, but I agree that you shouldn’t pay them anything for access. You’re just setting yourself up for them to extort more money out of you for every other little BS thing down the road.
(though evicting the renters to chop it up into smaller apartments does rub me the wrong way.)
this is funny:
“here is my eviction lawyer. Please take this $50 as a token of appreciation while I will look how to make a master bedroom out of your apartment.”
WTF??? When I first read the post, all I could say was WTF! I’m a tenant, but I can’t imagine my landlord or a potential new buyer having to pay me for access to something I DON’T OWN. Tenants in this city do deserve some rights, but as a whole, I think tenants need to be smacked down a bit. What ever happened to “Your lease is up and/or Here’s your 30 day notice now get the eff out”???? If these tenants wanna be hostile, the current owner should let them be hostile…on the damn street cause they’d have to take their attitude and sense of entitlement and get the hell outta my house. But, OP, you are clearly a more patient/giving person than I…I bow to your calm 🙂