That is pretty typical of legal immigrants to the USA for 200+
years. Illegals come in all flavors but too many are only looking
for the freebies.
Joel Cairo via Mercedes <mailto:mercedes@okiebenz.com>
BTW, on another aspect, the Mex trabajadores I would see around
working on house construction worked their butts off, 7-7, as did the
landscapers and any others I dealt with. I was very impressed with
their work ethic, it was a lot better than some of the lazy merkins
around. They had some significant motivations to work hard, make
money, and better themselves, whatever the issues about them being
illegals. I would gladly trade some of ours for them. We had a
landscape guy, Sanchez, who showed up the first time in some clapped
out little japmobile with a mower and weedwhacker and rakes and such
in the trunk, just him. Hit up my wife who hired him, I usually did
the mowing etc. as we had just a small lot and grass to deal with. By
the time we left he had a new nice Ford F-150, 3 crews with trucks and
trailers and a full suite of equipment, 3 guys per, they would show
up, unload, get to work and be gone in 15min for $25. He pretty much
ended up owning our little city. Run the numbers and you can see how
well he was doing, starting from pretty much nothing. He worked on
credit, would come around every week or two to collect, always asked
if there were any problems, great customer service. If something
outside the normal mowing, etc. needed to be done, he would do it
himself, no stranger to hot hard work. I had him deal with the house
after we left before it was sold, my neighbor kept an eye on him, no
problems ever. That guy was going places.
--R
Dan Penoff via Mercedes <mailto:mercedes@okiebenz.com>
June 3, 2016 at 6:33 PMvia Postbox
<https://www.postbox-inc.com/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=sumlink&utm_campaign=reach>
Certainly in this case it wouldn’t apply, since it wasn’t your house
that was stigmatized. However, from an ethical standpoint I would
think that they would disclose something like that or again, just not
show the house.
But then again, we’re dealing with realtors. I rest my case.
Dan
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Joel Cairo via Mercedes <mailto:mercedes@okiebenz.com>
June 3, 2016 at 6:22 PMvia Postbox
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In Texas it associates with the house, it has to be disclosed if
something happened in the house; otherwise, nothing needs be said.
--JC
Dan Penoff via Mercedes <mailto:mercedes@okiebenz.com>
June 3, 2016 at 6:20 PMvia Postbox
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No such thing as “good realtor”. While we can exclude your spouse, realtors
rank right up with puffy shirt used car sales guys. Same MO, different product.
I don’t believe any realtor worth their salt would have disclosed it if they
weren’t required to by law. If they had issues with it, they wouldn’t have
shown the house to begin with.
This brings up an interesting subject - disclosure of stuff like this varies
from state to state. It’s called “stigmatized property”. California is the
only state that I know of that expressly requires disclosure of deaths or
violent acts.
Dan
According to the NAR’s Code of Ethics, real estate agents are obligated to
discover and disclose adverse factors reasonably apparent in the properties
they deal with. Once an agent discovers, or should have discovered, an adverse
condition, she must disclose it to the buyer. With the courts increasingly
holding stigma-type defects to the same disclosure standards as physical
defects, the safest judgment call in every state is to disclose.
On Jun 3, 2016, at 6:58 PM, Kaleb C. Striplin via
Mercedes<mercedes@okiebenz.com> wrote:
A good realtor would have told you that and put you into another house if it
bothered you.
Sent from my iPhone
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Joel Cairo via Mercedes <mailto:mercedes@okiebenz.com>
June 3, 2016 at 5:46 PMvia Postbox
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OK I should be working but...
We moved to Houston in 1999 from the Boston area. I rented a big box
truck to haul a bunch of my workshop stuff and some other things
because it was heavy and the movers would have charged a lot. So I'm
driving this thing down through KY, was going to stop and see my
parents who lived in Western KY at the time. I was going through
Lexington, listening to the public radio station, they had this long
story on about this guy who had raped and tried to kill a coupla kids,
left them for dead on the railroad tracks. I think they were students
at UK, one might have died, I don't exactly remember. So then they
talked about all these other rapes and murders that had happened
around the country, LE thinks it is the same guy as they were all
close to railroad tracks. One happened recently in Houston, in West
University Place (it is a separate small city within Houston) where we
had just bought the house. They called the guy the "Railroad Killer."
Hmmm I'm thinking...
So I get there a coupla days later, wife and daughter had flown down,
the realtor we used picked them up at the airport and we all got to
the house within a few minutes of each other (good planning!). So we
check out the house, chat a bit. The house had been newly built in
the neighborhood, builder having torn down a little 2-3 BR house that
was falling apart, and that was kinda the procedure in the
neighborhood. So there was always a lot of construction, and in
Houston it is all hispanics, mostly Mexicans, mostly illegals. There
were railroad tracks across the street behind a row of houses on the
street to the side (we were on a corner), it was not too busy at that
time, maybe 2-3 trains a day, but one ran through late at night.
So I bring up this thing I had heard on the radio, and ask the realtor
if she knew anything about that. Now this realtor was all friendly
and such, and trying to be helpful, get us settled in, anything we
needed. So then she says oh yeah everyone knows about it. So we talk
about it a minute and I ask, so where did the woman get killed? She
gets all stuttering and stammering and finally points to the house
directly across the street. My wife and I just about dropped one
right there. WTF? So then she gets all kind of evasive when we ask
why she never mentioned it, etc. and finally decides she needs to
leave. Well, that was a surprise, huh? The railroad killer
apparently jumped a train right across the street, comes and kills the
neighbor in her bed, while doing other quite vile things to her before
and after her death. It was horrible, like really horrible. I'm not
sure it would have made a difference in us buying the house or not if
we had known, but it would have been nice. Turns out the
sellers/realtors only have to disclose that kind of stuff if it
happened in the particular house for sale. So there was no compulsion
to tell about it, but still...
I found out details later, apparently the garage door did not close
all the way, it was up maybe a foot or so, and he got in that way,
then through the door into the house. Found the woman asleep and did
the deeds. She was a doctor, her husband was a supervisor or
something on oil rigs, so he was gone half the time. At that time I
think he was on land, but had gone off to see his kids from another
marriage or something, the cops wondered if they had issues but it
turned out not, he was off somewhere a ways away with the kids at the
time. There were some suspicions she might have had something going
on on the side, maybe a boyfriend did it, but that never sorted out
either. They didn't find the woman for 2-3 days when she didn't show
up to work, someone went over or called the husband or something to
get in.
Our house was under construction at the time, and they had some
indications the guy was hispanic (DNA or something, or the UK kid(s)
who lived reported it. So naturally the workers at the house, who
could see comings and goings, that the woman was alone, etc. were
prime suspects, figured it might be a drifter who worked for awhile
here and there then did the deeds and moved on. Reasonable
hypothesis. Apparently that never panned out, but a lot of those guys
come and go so they could never track them all down for sure.
I was working out of the house, my office was upstairs in front so I
could see goings on out the window, in front and over toward the
houses by the tracks on the side street. Every now and then a whole
load of cops would show up and be going crazy, someone calling with a
"sighting" or something. At some point a few weeks after we moved in
a couple move into the murder house, he was a retired doc, and come to
find out she was an FBI agent. They were living there with the
possibility the guy could return at some point and if so they could
deal with him. Apparently that is a trait of serial killers so the
FBI were trying to cover that possibility. They were very nice but
she was a total no-bullshit person, wound kinda tight, I was kinda
glad they were living there.
Some months go by, I forget how long, and I hear on the radio they had
caught the guy. Turns out his "wife" in Mexico (and she was
apparently not the only one) had received a gift of some really nice
jewelry from him and given their economically-deprived circumstances
she was extremely suspicious of where it had come from. She went to
the cops in Mexico, I think they were pretty close to the border
somewhere down by Brownsville, and they matched it up with jewelry
that had belonged to the neighbor woman, he had stolen it after he
killed her. So that was it, the Mexican cops rounded him up and sent
him across to the Texas Rangers right quick. His name, more or less,
was Rafael Resendez-Ramirez. The "wife" was a very honorable woman,
and apparently she had heard too about the murders and realized that
they had been occurring during his absences, put it all together with
the jewelry.
That afternoon the TV trucks show up, they're all doing stories out
front with the house in the background. A couple of them knock on my
door, wondering if I had anything to say. Sure. So this cute young
thing is interviewing me, and an older guy is running the cam, and we
chitchat a bit. So she asks me what I think should be done with the
guy. I say, "See that big oak tree over there?" The cam guy swings
the camera over to get the shot. The girls says yes, what about it? I
say, I got a rope that will go right over that stout limb there, we
could deal with the problem right quick." The girl just about chokes,
the camera guy starts laughing like hell, and she breaks off the
interview. I never watched to see if they put it on TV or not.
Anyway, they tried the guy in Htown, he pled guilty, sang like a bird,
he was batshit crazy, but he was executed within a few months, never
extradited to any other places where there would have been a lot of
whiny handwringing over him. Texas dealt with it, no one had any
anxiety over it. I think there were a LOT of murders (and attempted)
all over the country, over a dozen if I recall, and some they figured
he did but he either didn't remember or didn't say or something. He
rode the trains, would jump off, do one, and jump on another train to
some other place, large cities and small towns and even sorta out in
the country.
The doc and FBI agent moved out soon, the house went up for sale, and
a couple with 2 kids bought it. They were quite Catholic, and had a
priest or two come in and do their thing, so they felt OK that all the
demons and whatever had been ejected, the house blessed, etc. before
they moved in. They had no issues about it after that. I ended up
remodeling their kitchen for them (quite a nice job if I may say) and
always felt a bit creepy working in there as the bedroom was right
next to the kitchen, but sorta let it pass, hoping the padres had
dealt with it.
My wife was really pissed at the realtor, I would occasionally see her
around and she always kinda avoided communications. That experience
kinda put me off realtors.
--R
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