Today, our Board of Realtors held a special class on Leases. As a Director on the Ann Arbor Area Board of Realtors, I had been pushing for this class for several months. We were seeing more and more sellers that can't sell their homes put them on the market to rent.
I have literally seen everything under the sun happen. One agent came to me with a wad of travelers checks and said her client had to leave the country and gave her the money for the deposit on a rental. Amazingly, the listing broker told her their company would not take it in cash. So we got a title company involved to hold the money.
I have seen leases written on sale contract addendums, Washtenaw County Bar forms, zipforms etc. Some lessors start the lease process, and some tenants. On realtor in town told us to leave the deposit in a cashiers check in her mail box on a busy road. No way !! Leasing in Ann Arbor has literally been out of control.
My daughter, had a client that was going to rent a house and the listing agents told her " Christa, you will have to do all the work because my company doesn't pay me for leases." Ok, so she put in 1 months rent for the commission, and you can imagine what happened. Yep, she got a call, " Christa, why did you put one month commission in?" Well, you told me to draw up the lease, that you were not going to have anything to do with it because your company didn't pay you on leases. Never mind she still had the commission listed at 3 % for a rental.
So we had this class today, held by Cindy Reach of Reach, Reach, Fink and Volvo, realestate law office in Ann Arbor, MI. This happens to be the firm I use for all my realty needs and Cindy did a excellent job.
However, did you ever take a class and wish you didn't know what you just learned ? That's how I felt walking out of this class.
Gosh, it is harder to lease a home in Ann Arbor or Ypsilanti than anywhere in the surrounding area's. I learned you have to have the home certified, I learned you still have to have lead based paint disclosures, Megan's Law, credit reports, and all the federal, state and local fair housing laws. Now, I knew some of this, I guess I was just naive on the liability of it all. Did you know you can check the state web site here on who is a sex offender in Michigan but then you are not allowed to disseminate the information. HUH ?????????
You can look, find out if the buyer wanting the lease is on the sex offender list, but you can't pass the information along, you can't NOT rent to them, but if you do and the neighbors find out it is a sex offender you can be sued for renting to them. Is there something wrong with this picture ??
Gee, all I wanted was a simple class on 1) how to do a lease 2) how to hold a security deposit 3) who iniates the lease 4) who pulls credit blah blah blah and I get all this.
The exciting thing about it is you get to make 1/2 months rent in most circumstances. :) I don't know how everyone else felt, but I think I will be passing along a lot more information when my sellers call me and say," Missy, can you put our home on the market as a rental and whatever happens first."
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