Reply to RENTERS: No license, no rent

Forum Index » Real Estate

Reply to "RENTERS: No license, no rent "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Here’s a summary of the “draconian laws”: privacy, safety, dignity, at minimum levels.

https://realestateinthedistrict.com/dc-rental-basement-guidelines/[/quote]

Yea, I get that.  But the devil is in the details and in who you get as an inspector.

I’ll give you a very good example, using our place as an illustration.  When we bought it it had tenants in the basement but no certificate of occupancy.  The basement is so nice that it’s what sealed the deal for us.  We literally thought “wow, we don’t need the upstairs at all, we could live here!”

The tenants knew the place didn’t have a C of O but didn’t care.  They wanted to stay on, and we were fine with it.

The Sellers’s agent told us that the sellers did try to “make it legal,” but guess what the hold up was:  the circuit breaker for the entire house is in the basement apartment, and the inspector insisted that each unit had to have access to their circuit breakers through their own unit.  Tearing out the walls and moving part of the wiring upstairs in order to install a separate circuit breaker in the upstairs living room would have cost thousands and thousands of dollars with absolutely no “health or safety” enhancements whatsoever.  I mean, I guess if the situation were the other way around and the whole circuit breaker system was upstairs instead of down, there might be some kind of argument that could be made that it needed to be this way for the tenants.  But if the circuit breaker is downstairs, and you and the tenant agree that if an upstairs circuit ever trips - which has happened maybe twice in the many many years that we have owned the house - we could either ask the tenant to switch it back for us or, if they’re not around, go into their apartment (with permission being granted in the lease for this specific purpose), what’s the problem?  Where’s the health and safety issue?

Oh, and we were also told that by paying $6000 to a private company to deal with DCRA for us we could guarantee a different result.  Sounds an awful lot like facilitating a bribe to me.

If you can guarantee me that DCRA will treat my application fairly, and put money where your mouth is, I’d be happy to give it a go.  Otherwise, I’ll take my chances on a fine.

By the way, have you ever gone a mile over the legal speed limit on the thinking that, hey, yea, it’s illegal but not hurting anybody?
[/quote]

Oh, boy, where to start with this. You know what started a fire that killed two young people on Riggs Place? An electric thing in their landlords part of the house. So you are very wrong and very very dangerous. I can only hope your renters read this board (which will also get crossposted)[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics