let me premise this by saying I have in no way anything against people that rent out there property. This is in reference to those who don’t take care of the properties that they rent out and the people who claim to help you when they don’t.  This is the Sad situation at the time the market was getting ready to plummet I encouraged my husband to try and refinance our house so that we would not get into the ARM issue.

Well after making many phone calls we found out that both of our credit scores had plummeted due to the purchase of our house in the first place.  The oh you can refinance in 6 months was yet another lie.  We were unable to refinance because we could not get approved.  So reluctantly we had to sale our house.  Now we had an agent that stated she would help us out.  She stated that she would indeed buy our house with a condition. What was the condition?  We stay in the house and pay her rent and buy the house back.  WONDERFUL you say yes if she had done what she said she was going to do.   We paid her rent for almost a year.  When we started thinking we should be able to buy the house back now.  Well, turns out we couldn’t get approved at the price the house was now being appraised.  So, thinking apart of our rent was going toward a closing we received a letter months later stating that we were behind 3 months and on the verge of foreclosure.  Wow, was our reaction.  So we wanted to know where was the money going if it wasn’t going to the mortgage?  She claimed that because we paid her on the 2nd of the month that she incurred late charges which put her behind.  When we asked for proof of that because we had been paying her way before the 1st of every month how could this be?  So, placed in a panic we started looking for a place to live for months we were unable to find a place and the inquiries were killing our credit.  So, we received a tip of a house that was in need of some tenants without a serious credit check ( should have been a first clue).  We saw the place and it was not the best but it was duable considering the owner(landlord) stated he was going to repair alot of the things that were wrong with the house, including filling up the swamp looking pool in the back yard.  I stressed that we had a toddler and that this was very important so that the pool needed to be a priority.  He agreed and we signed the lease.

Fast forward several months later,  after Veterans Day we never saw this man again.  He fixed a couple of things however, after that every month something broke down including communication.  We were sending our rent checks but he wasn’t cashing them.  At one point I had three months rent in my bank account.  When we finally caught up with him to ask him why hadn’t he cashed the check he said He never received them.  WHAT!!!!!????  Why hadn’t he called to find out why we hadn’t paid him.  So, we resent him a check to see if he would receive it cause we were very leary about sending a cashier’s check if he wasn’t receiving them. We sent it certified and miracuolusly he received it, and yet the money remained in our account for another month.  We received a notice from the sheriff to vacate the premises!  We were like what happened?  So, the block captain of our street state that they had done this before whenever they want to get someone out to put one of their people in they will build a case against the person and then have them evicted.  So, we went to court to have the rent placed in escrow however, they didn’t show up in court and we could not have the rent placed in escrow because we were “not current” So considering he never did fill up the pool or any other of the things that didn’t work, we started looking for a place only this time we decided to buy. (for more details see Short sale not a Sale).

Powerpoints

When renting investigate your landlord best you can. Interview the neighbors how long have they known the property owner.

Is this a decent neighborhood? does it have a high turnover rate?

Have a contract of your own read the lease carefully this landlord had us paying for everything hence if we have to pay for everything we might as well own it.

Make sure that the house is in livable and good condition.  My children had a big back yard that they could not utilize because of the swamp in the backyard.  If there was anything or anybody in that pool we never knew.