greenlandlord

There are free electronics recycling events coming up tah all da 5 boroughs. You are free to recycle all your old electronics.

Now I am usually of the mind that, “hey I can use that old mac serial cable in some incredibly unforeseen upcoming project,” but quite frankly, the mac serial is a deader than dead tech and we really should let go. So, for all of our piles and piles of old electronics that we need to let go of, electronics recycling is offering a way out. I know, you paid $300 for that zip drive when it came out, but you know what? It’s time you hit the delete button on it. If it loves you, it will come back to you (maybe in the form of an ipod or a dvd writer or just a brief experience where you hear 100 megabytes of music or something).

Check it out here (from greenlinks).

So in a previous post, I mentioned that there has was some ridiculousness involved with registering for water and sewer service. Well, I registered two months ago, and never got a bill. Yesterday, however, i got a letter from the DEP saying that I haven’t paid my september water bill, and that late charges will be assessed. What’s worse, the letter has no invoice associated with it, so I still don’t know what the bill is. When I got around to calling them today, they were closed.

Now I have two upcoming projects with water. I have two 50 gallon water heaters in the basement area. I think I can fit heaters up to 75 gallons in there, and would like to, so the tenants will have more hot water available. The question is how to do this to interrupt service as little as possible. The other one is how to find a natural way to heat this water. I am open to suggestions.

oh yeah, and I should probably pay that bill too, as soon as I know how much it is.

So a lot of stuff has happened since I became a landlord, and I want to give kind of a quick run down of what one has to do to get started (a good real estate lawyer should be able to help a lot with this, but I went through two, and still don’t quite feel like i can trust one. There is the possibility that it’s just because I had Brooklyn lawyers, and the gruff nature of Brooklyn courtroom, and therefore lawyers, has made it hard for me to deal with them, but I honestly don’t think so.)

1. Find a building… umm this was a long and complicated experience which involved a lot of personal heartbreak. I would be down with giving tips to anyone who needs help.
2. Close on building - Make sure you have an assignment of rents.
3. Alert tenants of change of ownership in writing. I would say find out as much as possible ahead of time from the current owner, who should write the letter. Have the tenants acknowledge in writing that they have received the notification.
4. Alert the Department of Environmental Protection and sign up for an account for your water and sewage (not that it really matters… more on this ridiculousness in a bit).
5. Register with HPD. Make sure you bring your checkbook, a registration form, your Employer Identification Number (or Social Security number) and a copy of your deed to 100 Gold St. And unlike other government offices, you have to know ahead of time that it closes at 4pm on weekdays. Also, about a week later, you need to come back and get an officially notified copy of this form so you can prove to the court (because let’s face it you will go to court).
6. Here’s a kicker, you have to register with welfare somehow. Now I don’t know how, because after a while, I was eventually contacted by welfare. When in doubt, however, 311 always works for New York. So once you’ve established contact with welfare, you have to fax them a copy of the sale deed as well.
7. Find yourself a Landlord and Tenant Lawyer that you trust and can ask questions of.
8. Fix any violations (there is bureaucratic absurdity involved here too… I promise I will explain more about this soon).
9. Get to know your tenants.

I will update this post as I have time, maybe make a page out of it. Kind of a poor man’s landlording “how-to”

Luis Torres, who lives 3 buildings over from my property, has unexpectedly passed today as a result of liver failure. I’ve only met him once, but he seemed to be a good man. My condolences go out to his family.

Ok, so, not being too technically inclined, it took me a little while to get this up and going. After figuring out how to use Fantastico, i managed to get WordPress installed (quite cool, open source is definitely getting more and more competetive with ummm… closed source). I then slowly figured out how to change the theme of the site to look more like the planned subject matter. Yes, folks, style before substance and i would not write one word til it looked goooood.

So here’s the story: I am a new landlord. I have been taking care of a building since July, and as of this posting have pretty much been doing it for three months. In a city as vast and sprawling as New York, it’s hard to find the information that you need to figure out what to do. I have done so much and wanted to document this in case there was any question of how to do this in the future. Also some of the events involving my building have been so memorable, i figured they had to be saved for posterity.

The Green… So the green represents two things:
1. I am new to this, thus making me a green landlord.
2. I have an eye toward making this building ecologically sustainable.
3. I am pretty unfamiliar with how to do that as well, so that make me greensquared. but greensquaredlandlord.com or greengreenlandlord.com sounded stupid.