Buying Rental Property - Avoiding Seller's Dirty Tricks
By Steve Gillman
Are you considering buying rental property? Let me tell you a story. We stayed a week at a hotel one winter. Our bill showed twice what it should have, but since I already paid the correct amount in cash, I thought nothing of it. We noticed the lobby and swimming pool were unheated, and thought it was frugality. A year later, when I read a news story about a new owner struggling to make the hotel work, I realized what was going on.
The owner was planning to sell, and she was using the two most basic ways to inflate the appraised value: decrease expenses and increase reported income. Just by stopping repairs, not heating the pool, and quietly adding $100 in false income every day, she may have...
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