This seems absolutely miserable.
They created an L.L.C. with a 25-page operating agreement and bought the house for $2.52 million, closing in the spring. Their agreement outlines three pools of money: one for the jointly held mortgage, one for improvements and one for operations (including internet service, insurance and taxes). It also addresses how to manage disagreements and future living developments.
No way this ends badly!
This just sounds like a co-op model, which is the most common type of home ownership in NYC. Usually coops are larger buildings but 3-5 unit coops are not uncommon, I know a couple people who live in them. Which is not to say they aren’t awful arrangements, they are, but all home ownership arrangements are pretty bad when you get down to it.
There was an NYT article about home ownership in Switzerland. Even after WW2, ownership rates there were less than 50% and it’s sunk even lower.
Switzerland’s nine million residents are some of the wealthiest people on the planet — and they are mostly renters. Increasingly, even urban professionals here find themselves locked out of the real estate market. The average price for a studio apartment in Zurich is $1.1 million, according to the research company Wüest Partner. On a square-foot basis, Zurich is about 80 percent more expensive than Paris.
At a time when young people in places like coastal California, New York and London cannot see a path to buying a home, Switzerland offers the world a glimpse of a post-ownership society. Around 36 percent of the Swiss own their homes or apartments, the lowest rate in the West and well below the 70 percent average in the European Union, and the 67 percent in the United States. While many young Swiss people say they see positives in a lifetime of renting — mostly, avoiding the hassles and commitments of homeownership — at the same time they admit feeling resentful that they don’t have a choice.
What happens when someone wants to sell or dies? You get a new random roommate?
In many co-op situations, the remaining tenants (or a board in larger buildings) have to approve of a sale. They technically aren’t allowed to block on the basis of membership in a protected class (race/sex/etc), but courts give them a lot of discretion. The particular rules are usually written into a contract when the coop is establishe and new tenants agree to the terms when they buy in.
Best guess on the anti trust lawsuit effect on commissions model moving forward?
As Bigoldnit already said, coop residents actually have more influence over who their neighbors get to be. They were popularized here for affluent professionals who didn’t have quite enough money to get their own townhouse in a rich neighborhood but still wanted assurance that no undesirables would move in. The OG gated communities. The upside is that because of that power, everybody in coop buildings gets along and there are hardly any disagreements or fights.
One of the fun upshots of the coop model is that it complicates the ability of residents to liquidate any equity in the building. Thus, virtually every building has leveraged the full value and carries an underling balloon mortgage. Thus, the actual value of your shares is basically the privilege to rent a specific unit under a lease the terms of which are wholly at the mercy of your coowners. It’s wonderful.
So after 15 years of home ownership, I saw a mouse in the house for the first time ever.
My youngest child is 3 years old and has significant development issues to the point I would not be comfortable having any snapping mechanism or poison that is is any way accessible to her. It will not be possible to communicate the danger to her or ensure her curiosity doesn’t lead to injury.
We have an indoor cat. She is a Persian cat that is great as something akin to a living stuffed animal, but does not have anything like cat like reflexes. I think she will be of no help killing any mice but might help spotting them. Important though that it’s not really practical to remove all food sources from the house as the cat’s food dish still needs to be somewhere.
What should I do here? Buy a bunch of child safe mouse traps from Amazon and put them in places unreachable by the kids (e.g. garage, under oven, behind fridge)? Just go directly to calling an exterminator?
You can put snap traps where your daughter won’t be able to reach. Mice like to stay in dark, hidden areas. I don’t think I’ve ever put a trap down somewhere a three year old might get to it and I don’t have any three year olds, that just happens to be the best place for them. If you can find where they’re coming from they’ll trigger quick too. Don’t call an exterminator. They’ll just throw poison down in the same areas you could easily do yourself.
not an expert but i would guess that you need to seal up any exterior entrance points. poison doesn’t make sense because they could die in the wall where you can’t access them. if you know where they are coming into the interior of the house from you could probably set up traps at night time while your daughter is sleeping and remove in the morning? you could also probably buy some kind of dog gate and then return it after this is over.
Do you have a basement and attic?
Problem is that if you’ve seen one, there could be (probably are?) more. If you are certain of point(s) of entry, traps may be enough.
However if they are nesting somewhere in the house, traps can take a while. Some of the poison they use these days are desiccants, the theory is that it makes them thirsty, then they leave house in search of water, then they die outside of house. I don’t know if that’s just exterminator sales talk or what.
I routinely beg people in my neighborhood not to use poison because those sick mice wander out and get eaten by predators, making them sick as well. Might matter less in a place without as much wildlife, but we have owls and bobcats.
yes I have basement (finished) and attic. I’ll try the traps behind kitchen appliances and in the basement and garages areas and see how it goes
Yes I think this is definitely a concern. Looking at a couple articles the “second generation” poisons are very bad for predators. The first generation stuff is… hard to say, from this article anyway. It kind of implies first generation baits with certain ingredients are ok (see end of article)
https://www.audubon.org/magazine/january-february-2013/poisons-used-kill-rodents-have-safer
I have an electric trap in our basement and it works great, put a little peanut butter or whatever at the back of it, when they enter the hole to eat it they get a lethal shock.
Don’t use poison
The bucket traps can work pretty well. You can build one yourself pretty easy - no need to pay for the overpriced ones from Amazon.
The other big thing to do is try to find where they are getting in. You probably can’t fully eliminate all entrance points, but I was able to significantly reduce mice by just walking around the house and filling any crack or hole I saw with the foam filler spray.
I am probably ending my Home Ownership experiment this spring. While I don’t really want to give up a decent mortgage rate (3.875) I think I am going to take my ~50000 in equity (before commission) and run. The expected amount of rent that I can get for this place makes it a break-even at best proposition each month (without taking into account repairs on a 50-year-old townhouse). The HOA is underfunded and nowhere near what their cash reserves should be. I have a balcony that their responsibiltity that has been unusable since I bought the place in 2019 they don’t seem to want to fix. Major repairs are on the horizon (such as roads) and I am expecting more special assessments will be needed to cover them. I am part owner of a cabin in MI, and my girlfriend expects to inherit her parent’s lake property in WI so long term I have housing options. We will probably rent for the foreseeable future but have thought about being mostly nomadic eventually. It sucks that I will be saying goodbye to Vegas after 12 years. There’s a lot I love about it but the gf wants to be close to family in WI. Is there anything else I should be thinking about when making a Rent Out vs. sell decision? I understand I would likely want a property management company that takes a solid cut (7-8%) if I opt not to sell.
Completely unrelated, but though I’ve lived in rural areas a good chunk of my life, I’d never seen a bobcat in person until last week. It was stalking a rabbit in my yard, I was hyped.
bbb7979 - see if you can increase your local bobcat population, that’ll help keep the mice down.
I’m dealing with a mouse problem right now too and it’s absolutely terrorizing me. A few tips:
- This thread on Reddit gets recommended a lot, and I think it’s a good starting place.
- Look for the poop. That can tell you a lot about where they’re hanging out and where they’re getting in. Definitely put traps, etc in those areas.
- If needed, you can get an inexpensive camera that alerts you to movement at night. I think I got one for like $30.
- In your case with kids and a pet, the electric trap that DUCY posted seems like a great idea. I have one too and it’s super easy to set up.
I’ll write a separate post about poison in a minute.