Mitch wrote: "While any individual renter may be just fine, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between property value and percentage of rental homes vs owner occupied. OTOH, you can work it to your advantage after the neighborhood goes to heck. Back in the 1980's I knew a guy who lived in a run down part of Lansing, MI. He fixed his house up, fenced it in, and bred GSD guard dogs in the back yard. Whenever a house on his block would go up for sale, he'd buy it for $20-30k, fix it up, and rent it to somebody he'd want for a neighbor. The idea was to eventually be in control of who all the neighbors were, while being able to retire on the rent proceeds."
I rented a house in Topeka, KS when I was going to law school. It was the only rental house in the neighborhood. It was all little old ladies (who had lived there for 30 years) or new couples with their first home. I told the landlord that if we were going to rent the house, we would be staying for three years. He was thrilled. In fact, I got him to lower the rent by $50 a month if I signed a 2 year lease. It was a great neighborhood. When I first moved in, I was doing a lot of yard work (classes didn't start for three weeks and I was bored) and the little old widow next door would bring me iced tea and cookies. She said she had never seen a renter work so hard on the yard. I said, we are going to be here for three years, so it might as well be nice. The landlord loved us (as you can imagine) and let us do all sorts of projects. In fact, he paid me to remodel a basement bathroom. He really liked it when my student loan checks would come in, because I would pay all of the rent for the next months. We figured that if we had the money, we might as well pay it because we were poor and no matter what, we would have a place to stay. As it turns out, I should have bought the house and sold it when I moved to Wichita. With all of the improvements we did on the house, that is exactly what the landlord did. Not all renters are bad. Donald H. Snook -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://okiebenz.com/pipermail/mercedes_okiebenz.com/attachments/20090126/29c86a47/attachment.html> _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com For new and used parts go to www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
