Category — Landlord Biz

We sprayed a tenant’s suite for cockroaches, and it didn’t work.  The tenant wrote a letter demanding we do it again, and if we didn’t, she would put her rent in escrow.  She worked at a law office.

We sprayed again.  Then we sprayed the whole building.  About a thousand dollars’ worth of spray.

She still had bugs.  So she called the city building department, which sent out its newest, most gung-ho inspector, who decided we needed to point the chimney and plane the boiler-room door in the basement, and fix up everything in between.

Then she complained again.

So we brought in our cockroach “bomber” guy, who zapped her apartment, including a direct hit on her coffee maker. A dozen cockroaches scampered out.  She had gotten a used coffee maker from her boyfriend.

That roach-infested coffee maker set me back $2,000.

I planned not to renew her lease, but she told me she was not renewing her lease before I could tell her I was not renewing her lease.

That bugged me.  Her boyfriend annoyed me too.  As did her 20-pound bond, legal stationery.  She wasn’t even a lawyer.

On move-out day, she and her boyfriend put the mattress and air conditioner on the treelawn.  I had to move the items to the dumpster.  Mattress moving is seriocomic wrestling; A/C pick up is clean and jerk.  And I didn’t deduct anything from her deposit.

She was OK.  Her only major negative: that she had dropped a dime (X 20,000) on me.

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Treelawn, two paragraphs above, is Cleveland talk for the grass strip between the street and the sidewalk.  Odder:  Akronites — Akron, Ohio, residents — call the treelawn the devil strip.
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2 of 2 posts for 12/9/09

Terry wanted to sell Notre Dame paraphernalia from an empty store I had across from St. James Church.  He had just come back from South Bend, Ind., with a carload of merchandise.  [Terry isn’t his real name.]

He sang in two church choirs, knew the bishop, and knew the town’s development director, Kelly.  He knew the mayor too, FitzGerald.   And probably knew the former building director, Fitzgerald.

Terry wanted the rent lowered.

I couldn’t figure out if he had any money.

He kept talking choirs.  He sang in two — St. Ignatius and St. Malachi.  That wasn’t money.

I told him my building manager sang in a choir too — a Ukrainian one. “Call the manager to see the inside of the store,” I said. “He lives in an apartment right above the store.”

“You own the apartments above too?” Terry said.  “I’m looking for a place.”

That was a bad.  Maybe Terry’s car trunk had all his worldly possessions, plus the Notre Dame gear.

I told him I had a vacancy upstairs. “Too bad about Notre Dame’s final twenty-two seconds against Michigan,” I said.

He didn’t want to talk football.  I couldn’t blame him . . . Michigan and Notre Dame.

Terry didn’t rent — the store or the apartment.

I’ve only had a couple commercial tenants who also lived in the building.  I had a photographer who lived in the basement of his shop.  That was free living quarters. The photographer installed a dishwasher, stall shower and kitchen.   He was down there for decades, and the city never looked.  That photographer should have had a bumpsticker: “Thank God I’m a Morlock.”  (In the 1980s, ethnic bumperstickers were a fad in Cleveland. “Thank God I’m Slovenian” was the most popular, I think.  “Thank God I’m Jewish” was special order.)

I had a barber who lived over her store.  She paid extra.  Her store had a window sign: “Fighter Chick Parking Only.”  She was a lesbian Puerto Rican cage fighter who got along with everybody.  (She’s still there, but doesn’t live in the apartment.)

I had a Chinese tenant who lived beneath his meditation and “healing arts” studio.  He lasted 10 years.  (He didn’t live under the store all those years.  Only after his divorce.)   If you develop a following, you can make it in a business like healing.  Yoga is another field like that.  Charisma-driven.  I have a yoga store that seems to be doing well.  The owner is very outgoing.

I had a tenant who re-sold children’s toys.  She left me a basement of orphaned Fisher-Price kids.  A whole basement: the kids, plus broken schoolhouses, gas stations and school buses.  Also, Little Tykes picnic tables and Big Wheels.  I wish she had left a Fisher-Price dump truck.
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2 of 2 posts for 11/25/09

The phone number at AAA Window Shade Co. was 221-3700.  The proprietor, Joe Villoni, started there at 13, and was 87 when he pulled the last shade down.  Seventy-four years: same job, same location.

He quit in 2003 because nobody was buying window shades anymore.  Everybody was into $5 mini-blinds at Home Depot.  My father,Toby, and I had kept Joe’s rent low because Joe never asked for anything.

The store’s wood floor had a grooved path circumnavigating the huge window shade—making machine. That apparatus, and possibly the whole store, belonged in the Henry Ford Museum.

I always liked Joe — and the other old-guy tenants.  I was just a baby, a pisher (pisser/youngster), to these guys.  Another old tenant, Jim English, gave me a metal Phillies cigar box full of screws.  I appreciated the cigar box more than the screws. I was in my twenties and collected anything older than myself.

An old custodian, Jeanne Saunders, left me several novel manuscripts when she died. She had one lung, a great disposition, and a tough life; she should have written her life story and gone easier on the long, lanky cowboys and gladiators.

Another old custodian, Mary Kubichar, produced a concert for Yiddishe Cup.  It was at the Beck Center for the Performing Arts on the West Side.  That was the first — and last — West Side Yiddishe Cup concert.  (West Side means “not a lot of Jews.”)

Mary was from western P.A.  (You need to say each letter: P. A.)  She never married.  After retiring from Higbee’s department store, she became a super volunteer at her church and the Beck arts center.  So when she told the arts center to hire Yiddishe Cup, they owed her.  The concert turned into an appreciation party for Mary. (She died the next year.) Even the publisher of the Cleveland Plain Dealer showed up.  It was a very big deal.  We played a couple Slovak pieces for Mary.
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1 of 2 posts for 10/28/09.  Please see post below too.

I knew a building inspector who could smell rats.  That’s what he claimed.   He didn’t have to see the droppings.

I knew a custodian who could jimmy almost any apartment door with a credit card.

My dubious talent is figuring if a tenant has skipped out or not.

First, the tenant hasn’t paid his rent. That’s a given.  I knock loudly on the tenant’s door.  No answer.

I yell “maintenance” a couple times, and bring out the master key. I yell “maintenance” a third time, and I step into the apartment.

A couch, a bed . . . always. Skippers leave behind the heavy stuff.  TVs too.  Everyone upgrades his TV on move-out.

Some small items stay behind: beer bottles, pennies, unopened bills.  Usually enough to fill three or four garbage bags.

The stove: cooked.

The refrigerator: always missing a couple crucial shelves.  Why?

Underwear and socks . . . gone.

No socks, no tenant.  The guy definitely skipped.

Some of his clothes are jumbled on the closet floor. Decent stuff too.  Skippers are usually too anti-social to take items to Goodwill.

I found a tux left behind.  The guy was 6-4.  I had the pant legs shortened.  (He wasn’t a skipper.  He was a dead man. And his place was clean.)

I enjoy wrecked apartments. So would most people, I bet.  It’s like staring at a car crash.  Most of my building managers like trashed apts.  (Some managers make extra money on the cleanups.)  One manager would gleefully phone me with on-the-scene reporting: “It looks like a cyclone went through here crossways!”

The rat hole tour isn’t for everybody. One young manager passed on a good show.  “I’m creeped out,” she said, standing in the apartment corridor, while I went into the suite.

What’s to be creeped out by a few bottles of beers, cat urine and cigarette butts?

Afterward, I sometimes phone the skipper to make sure he’s definitely gone.  I say, “You out yet?” No lectures about housekeeping.

Nobody likes to be criticized on his cleaning skills. And he might come back for his DJ magazines — and me.
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2 of 2 posts for 10/28/09

I had a store tenant who sold gravestones and pistachios.  His main window sign read Porter Monuments and a smaller sign was Pistachios.

Not a good sign.  He went under.

I had a tenant, the India Food Emporium . . . Indian spices, Indian bread, Indian music.  Then came the Marlboros and malt liquor.  Went under.

You want a samosa with that 40?

I got a call from a prospective tenant for a headlight removal business.  Not a bad concept; headlights are tricky to remove.  The caller repeated, “Head lice.”  I was still OK with it.

Yiddishe Cup/Kiddush Cup/Klezmer Cup/Some Kind of Cup.  Nobody knows our band’s name.  All klezmer bands really have the same name: A Klezmer Band.

Sometimes clients hire us after they’ve attended a fun out-of-town wedding with a klezmer band.  I ask, “What band?”  They say, “A klezmer band.”

There is only one klez band with a name: the Klezmatics.

Yiddishe Cup probably stole a gig from the Klezmatics.  An East Coast college promoter booked us because she thought she had heard us on the radio.  What radio show was she talking about?  She couldn’t remember.  We’ve been on Cleveland and Cincinnati public radio.  My guess is she heard the Klezmatics on NPR, googled klezmer, and somehow came up with Yiddishe Cup.  So she hired us: A Klezmer Band.
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2 of 2 posts for 10/7/09

Arvids Jansons.  I got a desk when he left.

Argero Vassileros.   Nickname: Argie.

Michael Bielemuk.  The Professor.  He had three rooms with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

Maria Malfundido.  (Not her real name but close enough.)  A kleptomaniac.  She stole light bulbs from the hall so we glued the bulbs into the sockets.

Zenon Chaikovsky.  Building manager and Ukrainian musician.

Saram Carmichael.  A black transvestite who solicited customers from her second floor window.  The johns waited at the bus stop outside her window.  What is a Saram?

Stan Hershfield.  One of the few Jews on the West Side.  He was raised in an orphanage and loved the word bubkes (beans), as in: “Stratton, I have bubkes so don’t hondle me about the rent.”  [Hondle is haggle.]  When Hershfield painted the wood floor in his kitchen, he beamed, “Only the best, Stratton, Benjamin Moore!”

Malfalda Bedrossian.  She was never late with her rent.  Put that on her tombstone.

Chris Andrews.  He made up for his regular name by sleeping in a coffin.

Merjeme Haxhiraj.  An Albanian who talked me down $10 on her rent every year.

John “Chip” Stephens.  A Chet Baker-like figure — in looks, music and name.  He played jazz piano all day and was so good he landed a tenure track job at a university in Missouri.
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2 of 2 posts for 9/30/09

I rent to musicians.  I used to give them a break. Like one musician didn’t leave his forwarding address for his security deposit, and I mailed it to him anyhow.  He specialized in electronic music.  I put “please forward” on the envelope.  I never got a thank you.  He should have sent an email thank-you at least.  He messed it up for the next guitar picker.

I had an older blues guy who screwed me out of a couple months’ rent.  A guy in his fifties ought to know that “12-month lease” means 12 months, not six months.

Youngsters — say, 22-to-30 year olds — can’t envision what 12 months means.  They think that’s forever.  I felt that way when I was in my twenties.  These young tenants try to weasel out of their leases.  They say they need to move home to help Grandpa, who broke his hip.  They need to help him drink beer and watch the Three Stooges!  These kids are moving out for one main reason: to shack up with their girl/boyfriend to save on rent.
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2 of 2 posts for 9/16/09

My father said job one was getting the rent checks in the bank.

He didn’t even trust the night drop.  Had to wait in line.

The worst was when a money order got lost.  It might take up to three months to get a replacement.

One time the bank lost 16 rent checks.  I used the night drop, and the envelope wedged between the metal chute and the bank’s brick wall.  Just got buried in there like a time capsule.  I thought I was going nuts . . . Did I forget to make the deposit?  Was the deposit in my car somewhere?  At home I spent many hours looking through file cabinets and garbage cans for that deposit.

The bank found the deposit three months later, and I said to my tenants, “See, I’m not senile.  It was the bank’s fault.”  It’s rarely the bank’s fault, so I had to brag.

I wrote the bank manager about my  predicament — my embarrassment telling 16 people I had lost their checks.  I asked the bank to waive its service fees for a year.  I wrote: “My late father, who started the business, began talking to me! . . . ‘You did what?  You lost the money?'”

The bank didn’t waive the fees.  They did, however, give me $110 to cover tenants’ tracer fees.
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2 of 2 posts for 9/2/09

I like to pay taxes.  I like to do the forms.

My dad taught me to do taxes.  Some dads teach their sons to fix cars.  My dad taught me to fix taxes.  He even kept two sets of books: one pencil, one ink.

These self-made guys — like my dad —  often kept two sets of books.

The second-generation, like me, usually go legit.

I got audited.  I didn’t take an accountant with me.  I left with a credit.

Landlords handle a lot of cash — rents, security deposits.  That’s why I got audited.

Always count cash in front of the custodian to make sure the custodian isn’t skimming.  The custodian can “rent” an apartment for a couple extra days and not tell you.  You should pop in occasionally on those “unoccupied” suites.

Here’s some entertainment law: What happens if you wear a costume for performance and off-stage too?  If it’s just on-stage, you can deduct it — and dry cleaning — as an expense.

I like keeping records.  This is the age of documentation and investigation.  Enjoy.

My bandmates appreciate my attention to detail,  I think.  My musicians never seem to know what they’ve made until I tell them at the end of the year.
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2 of 2 posts for 8/19/09

A landlord friend turned up his speaker phone to demonstrate how much he was loved.  Some kid, on the other end, asked if he had to hook up his own washing machine and dryer at the rental house.  My buddy said, “No, we’ll supply that.  Save your appliances for down the road when you buy a house.”  The kid was happy.

My friend rents houses in the Heights to medical residents, Case Western Reserve PhD candidates, and Cleveland Institute of Music students.  These people want to live near University Circle. They’re high achievers with no time, or inclination, to trash an apartment.

Has my buddy ever rented to a stripper?  No.  What about a stripper who uses crack? Doubt it.   How about a stripper who cracks a whip while using crack?

The West Side, where my properties are, is a little dicier than the ivory towers of the Heights.   Or can be — particularly if the landlord is lazy and plays the “show me the money and you’re in” game.

My company screens tenants big-time.  (OK, we did let the stripper in.  Make that exotic dancer.  Exotic dancer with child.  Pure innocence.)  We do criminal and civil court checks. Credit checks.  Previous landlord.

That’s called Keeping Up the Neighborhood. Sounds middle-class. True that.

We’re making a significant civic contribution — offering people a decent place to live in a decent neighborhood.  That’s probably a bigger civic contribution than what my band does.  In a nutshell, my plumbers and custodians keep up appearances.  Every day they create an art installation called Decent Neighborhood.

Is this art? The Webb building, Detroit Avenue at Webb Road.

Take the Webb building. It has a mother hen, concerned manager; Lebanese mini-mart guy on the ground floor; Korean dry cleaner; small-town Ohio Suzuki violin teacher upstairs; a Continental Express flight attendant, a truck driver, a welder, etc.

Some of these Webb tenants marry each other.  (That’s bad for business.  They move in together and I have an empty.)
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2 of 2 posts for 8/5/09.

Highly sensitive people.  That’s a book title: The Highly Sensitive Person. These folks are bugged by eyeglasses that rub their temples; pillows that don’t fluff out enough; shoes that don’t breathe well.  Basically, they’re like Woody Allen but not as funny or famous.

Cleveland has its share.  These highly sensitive people shouldn’t live in apartment buildings.

When I lived in an apartment, I thought the guy upstairs was dropping weights all day.  It was probably Kleenex.  I bailed in three weeks.

In my real estate leases, I put an addendum: “If you’re a party animal, party elsewhere.”

Doesn’t work.

For example, I have a couple piano-playing renters.  Lou, he plays classical all day.  That’s OK.  But then there’s Ragtime — not so well-loved.  Ragtime’s neighbor periodically calls the cops and writes me letters about “headache-inducing, thundering piano music.”

I told Ragtime to go electric — get some headphones and play for himself.  And I told the highly sensitive neighbor, he could move out and I’d give him his security deposit back.

He didn’t move.  He just kept writing.  He could crank it: “Right now I’m hearing piano music at decibel levels designed to throw the planet out of orbit . . . No more piano music!”

He liked to write more than he liked packing.
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1 of 2 posts for 7/29/09.  Please see post below too.
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Yiddishe Cup concert:  Wade Oval, University Circle, Cleveland.
6 p.m. Wed., April 5
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Watch a new YouTube video of Yiddishe Cup playing  the blue klez classic “Joe and Paul.”
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Read a review of the CD Klezmer Guy, Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, 7/15/09, by Lee Chottiner.

I employed a custodian whose family was “a bunch of  burglars,” according to the investigating cop.  Why the cop had waited so long to tell me, I don’t know.

All along, the custodian’s kids had pilfered tools and lawnmowers, but I couldn’t prove anything and, besides, I liked the custodian.  He was a hard-working “hillbilly”— his term by the way.

I was his “little bitty buddy” — and his kids were crooks.  They took the master key and broke into an apartment across the hall.

Then they committed a botched burglary down the street and confessed to that, plus my break-in.

My custodian and his family had to move out.  “See you in the funny papers.”  That was my custodian’s sign-off.  Six years with me, then bye because his kids were crooks.

“I’m getting better by the numbers.”  He said that too.  I never did figure that one out.

Twenty-four years later: A different custodian, Speedy: the hardest working man on earth.  Speedy climbed many a ledge and ladder for me — and upped my workers’ comp.  He fell off a lot of ladders.  And he had some crook relatives and friends.

One relative, his so-called niece, was a prostitute.  The niece took the master key and entered a neighboring apartment and stole the tenant’s checkbook, ID and ring.

At first I thought the burglar was Speedy’s “nephew” Dave, a felon.   But then my plumber  reported seeing a new woman around, Amber, sleeping on Speedy’s couch.  “A black guy is pimping her,” the plumber said.

I told the police about Amber.  The detective said, “Amber Carney.*  She’s a known druggie and thief.” [*Not her real last name but close enough.]

Amber, the “niece,” got caught at the bank, forging checks.

The victim — my tenant—was more upset about the stolen ring than the stolen money.  She said it was an Irish ring.  It was fenced.  It was gone.  She asked if I was Irish.

“No, I’m Jewish,” I said.

“Funny, I’m Palestinian,” she said.

No problem— for her.   She was, as my father used to say, one cool customer. Most females would have been out of that burglarized apartment in a day.  I changed the lock and she stayed another year, pressing charges against the whore.

Amber, the prostitute, went to jail.  Speedy moved out and took a job at an adult bookstore.  I know because I received updates about Speedy’s employment through his workers’ comp lawyer, who kept sending me claims — for years— about Speedy falling off ladders back in the day.
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1 of 2 posts for 7/22/09.  Please see post below too.

Yiddishe Cup concert: noon Sun., July 26, Little Mountain Heritage Festival, Painesville, Ohio.

Real estate has cycles, but nobody knows what, or when, they are.  Real estate is like life.  It’s not orderly like music or tennis.  One day, two-bedroom apartments are moving; the next, nobody will touch them.  Some years tons of tenants move out in January.  Some years everybody stays in January.  There is no pattern to anything in real estate.  The only certainty is 10 percent of your tenants will give you 90 percent of your problems.

I try to avoid certain tenants.  If I say hi to some of these people, it’s going to cost me at least $400.  Could be a new stove.  Could be a bathroom tile job.

I had a tenant whose wristwatch played Beethoven. That was interesting. I talked to him and it didn’t cost me a cent.  He had moved to Cleveland from Buffalo to teach guitar.  And his family ran a musical gifts company, he told me.

A tenant lent me a beat-up clarinet and we jammed.  Horrible reed.

I had a tenant who included a poem with her rent about wildlife outside her apartment window.  “The hawk waits/a dignified duration./Flies.”  Not bad.  I told her to take $25 off her rent — once.

Those were the good tenants.

. . . I had a tenant who regularly won the Miss Cleveland contest for transvestites.  His apartment was jammed with beauty pageant trophies — and young guys who crawled in his ground-floor bedroom window.  The cops — and I — did not like that.  Too many visitors is a big negative.  William, my drug-dealing tenant, also attracted a lot of traffic.  Bad for the hallway carpet.  The cops told me to stand to the side of the door —not directly in front — when I gave him his eviction notice. The cops were right next to me.  William said he wasn’t dealing drugs.  But he did move; he didn’t like the cops bugging him.
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1 of 2 posts for 7/8/09.  Please see the post below too.
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Yiddishe Cup concert 7 p.m. Sun., July 12, Hudson, Ohio.

How hard is this to understand: “If the applicant is approved and makes a deposit— and then decides not to move into the apartment — the deposit will be forfeited.”

Nobody gets it.

“I changed my mind . . . My mom just found out she’s terminally ill
. . . I’m going back with my wife . . . I should have told you I’m an alcoholic and need to move into a sober house.”

Bidness is bidness.  I hang on to the deposit.

Once a “changer” stopped payment on her deposit, a bank check.  That worked.  I didn’t know you could stop a bank check.  Nice move.  She got me.
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Next posting:  Wed., July 1.

Read an article about Yiddishe Cup in today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer, 6/28/09.  By John Petkovic.

The electric company used to be my favorite utility.  They rarely raised rates, and I knew how to get a live person quickly on their phone system.

Then the electric company jacked up their rates 10-fold in one day. I was paying $3.50/month for a vacant store.  Now it’s $35.

So I told the electric company to shut off the power at my vacant stores, and I told my building mangers to buy the biggest flashlights they could find.

Vacant stores . . . I’ve seen them in Phoenix and Boca Raton, Fla., too.

I used to lament I didn’t have all commercial stuff.  Commercial,  you just collect the rent, nothing to it.  Commercial tenants are not drunks, druggies or nuts.  Now I’m glad I have a mix of residential and commercial.

When you have a dead body in the real estate biz, go in with the cops.  The tip-off is the smell in the hall.

One time a tenant died without any heirs, so the tenant’s estate lawyer practically begged me to take a few months’ rent.  It was free money.

I once put an ad on Craigslist captioned “50-year lease available. Die here.”  Craigslist spiked that one pronto.  My point: the building had three tenants who loved the building so much they had clocked more than 50 years each and were going to go out on gurneys.

Reality check: one-third of tenants move out in a year; one-third move out in 2 years;  about one-third stay 3-to-8 years; and a minuscule fraction stay longer than that.  Doesn’t matter what you do.

Maybe one in 50 tenants is a derelict.

Try this . . . I’ve rented to a Cavani String Quartet violinist, a dancer in the Cleveland Ballet, and a prize-winning chef.  Plus tons of engineers, teachers, waiters and social workers.

I have a tenant who is always on the road with his band.  For a long time I didn’t know what band, because he was always on the road.

So I Googled him. He’s with Big Brother and the Holding Company.  Some of the Janis Joplin’s guys are still out there doing it.  My guy—my tenant —is young.  Maybe he props up the original guys.

If possible, avoid dealing with companies with more than 50 employees.  For instance, if your bank wants to show you a new “product,” don’t go in.

What product?  Banks don’t give out toasters any more.  I got a ski cap twenty years ago.  Last product I got was a bunch of  red tape.

Don’t make any errors when filling out bank and government forms.  If you make an error, you’ll spend months correcting it.

Good news:  IRS literature is decent reading.  If you want to read some clear prose, read the 1040 instructions.  It’s business poetry.  Engaging stuff about depreciation: 200 percent declining balance and straight line . . . “The straight line method is the only applicable method for trees and vines bearing fruit or nuts.”  Expands your vista.  The world is a more than just boilers and refrigerators.

“I’m going to take legal action.” That’s a favorite line from the intelligent disgruntled tenant.  The favorite line from the average tenant is profanity.  The favorite line from a  23-year-old is “That’s really sketchy.”

Go ahead and sue me.

As my father used to say, “Let them call me pisher (a nobody, a little squirt).  Who cares.”

Ninety-nine percent of the time, nobody sues.

My father once withheld payment from moonlighting cops who botched up a floor- sanding job.  That flabbergasted me — messing with cops.  It didn’t faze my father.  “Let them call me pisher.”

The cops really screwed up that floor.  It rippled like Lake Erie on a bad day. We had to go to carpet.

Eviction notices, I buy them by the carton. I go to court every two months.  The deadbeats rarely show up, and if they do, there’s nothing to talk about.  They didn’t pay the rent; they have to move.

I have a friend who is a nice-guy landlord.  He knows all his tenants and sometimes they screw him out of four months’ rent because he’s so nice.  I know another landlord who takes some of his tenants out to dinner.

At Christmastime I used to buy chocolates for tenants.  Spent over $1,000.  I got thank-you notes from 1 percent of the tenants.  My dad thought I was nuts.

I used to keep a folder called “goodwill,” in case the media phoned and said, “Can I speak to the slumlord?”   I’d whip that folder right out.   Haven’t needed it yet.