Category: July 2017

Dear prospective renters, I’m sorry. I’m sorry you’re having to look at rentals half the size of your house. His house now. Or maybe he sold it. Along with your stainless steel kitchens appliances and your washer and dryer that handled your clothes just the way you liked.

He got the house, but you got the kids. And, unfortunately, you also got the dog. Because how could you separate your children from their dog, at a time like this? When they’ve just lost their father. The dog is making it harder to find a rental. But the dog is coming with.

I admire that you’re doing everything you can to keep your kids in their school district – the best school district in the entire region. Your credit report is still good, but you need an income source. I know you thought you’d just take a couple years off when they were babies. But it’s harder than you realized to go back. You’re sending those resumes out every day, but this is New Mexico. There’s not much for jobs here. And you can’t pay that much rent on minimum wage, not by yourself.

I see you frowning as you stand looking in dismay at this cute little house, and I understand you’re used to better than this. I want to tell you it will be ok. But it could be hard for a long time. I’m so sorry. I know you never expected this. In the end, it will all work out. But it’s going to take awhile and meanwhile those kids are going to grow so fast. They may never have the childhood you imagined for them. But they’ll be ok. Just keep telling yourself, they’ll be ok.

Our Eagle Crest rental is being scammed again. This time a guy is advertising it for $750 per month! (It’s actually for rent for more than twice that). He’s telling people that he’s unexpectedly out of town on a family emergency and to just look in the windows!

The scammer’s plan is to then have them send him a deposit to hold the house for them. If multiple people fall for it, he could make a lot of easy money. And then I’ll have to deal with the fall-out when they find out they haven’t actually rented this house.

The reason I know what he’s telling them is two different people have come by in just the half-hour I’ve been here. They feel dumb when they find out, because they sort of figured the price was too good to be true.

There’s not much I can do about it. I have contacted the police, and left a message on the answering machine for the “telephone reporting line” and someone is supposed to be calling back. But I know they can’t really do anything about petty internet fraud. I’ve also flagged the ad and contacted craigslist requesting that they take it down. But of course I can’t take it down myself.

I also happened to have paper, pen, and painter’s tape with me, so I just made  dorky, handwritten signs and taped them to the windows and doors. Already I saw one person look at a sign and leave. I just hope the signs doesn’t scare off my legitimate renters!

I’m missing the days when I just had a regular job to go to.

Update: I put my phone number on my improvised signs on the house, and now people keep calling me. They are so sad when they see my sign on the door and it’s way more rent than they’d hoped. So they call just to double check, and they lament for awhile. They’ve all been nice about it. Just very disappointed.

So far I haven’t heard of anyone who actually sent money. I hope no one does.

Plus now I have to figure out how to prove it’s my house to prospective tenants. I have my settlement statement, but I don’t really want to be showing everyone how much I paid for it. I also have a warranty deed but it only includes the legal description, not the address. And the response I got from the title company was, “We don’t insure addresses, only legal descriptions.” Great. And the on-line assessor’s records still show the previous owner. I have no idea how often those are updated. Maybe soon I’ll get a utility bill for the house in my name.

 

If I were a photographer, I think I’d be a photographer of doors. They are such a great metaphor. And New Mexico is a great place to admire doors. The front doors, in particular, have a lot of character. Some are turquoise, many are hand carved and imported from Mexico.

Others are done by local artisans, like this one, carved by a local real estate agent I’ve worked with.

Here’s the exterior door of the house we’re renting. It’s not hand carved, and I’ve seen this same door elsewhere in the neighborhood. But I still like it.

Here’s the front door of the house we tried to buy that ended up with septic issues:

Here’s from another house we looked at but didn’t buy;

Here’s more great local front doors:

But unfortunately here’s the exterior door of our house on the hill. Yeah…

At some point a few years ago a real estate agent convinced us to paint it red. Real estate agents like little bits of red to make things “pop”. It’s amusing to look through pictures of houses for sale that have been staged – they all have random spots of red. Red accent pillows, red bits here and there, scattered through the rooms. Anyway, it’s a terrible front door, with or without the red paint.

Wooden interior doors are also common here in these southwest style homes. Here’s the style of the basic ones in the house we’re renting;

Other interior doors are even more elaborate. We looked at this house twice, but decided not to buy it because it was too awkward inside, and had no views. It had character though! This is a beautiful door.

Our house currently has prefab hollow white doors that you see in every low-end apartment building across the US. I had trouble finding a picture of them, because who takes pictures of boring white doors? I think this photo was one of those accidental bumps of the shutter button.

When we first started the remodel, I wanted to install wooden interior doors. But then we thought we were moving to a different house, and it would be a rental. We were trying not to spend too much money, so I decided that our existing doors were good enough for a rental.

Then yesterday morning, John and I went out the house to check the remodel progress. And it looked like our doors had bred in the night and made duplicates of themselves.

There were white doors everywhere. John was like, “Here are our new doors.” And I was like, “New doors? What new doors?!?”  He said, “You wanted new doors.” And I said, “Why would I want new doors that look exactly like the old doors?!?”

I was so upset I was on floor crying. This has been such a difficult project. John was saying it’s only money.  But it’s over $2,000 we just wasted on doors. I couldn’t believe it. What a huge disappointment to spend that kind of money and not get anything for it.

I’d post a comparison picture of the old ones vs. new ones, but I can’t even tell the difference between the old doors and the new ones.

Here’s what I think happened. I was going over the plans with the contractor awhile back and I told him to not bother with getting new stained wood doors. I figured we’d make do with our existing doors in order to save money. I must have said that the “white is fine.” That “white matches the territorial style anyway.”

So he got new wood doors and painted them white.

It’s tragic! I’m trying to be ok with it, it’s just a couple grand. But such a bummer! I could have had new wood doors!

In middle of the night last night I was checking my email, (no, of course I’m not supposed to be checking my email in the middle of the night. But my story makes no sense without that piece of info, so I might as well confess up front).

So – in the middle of the night last night I was checking my email, and someone had emailed me asking about a discrepancy in my ads – my “for rent” ad on Zillow showed my rental available for a reasonably high amount of rent per month, but a nearly identical ad on Craigslist, with the same photos and everything, showed my rental available for a significant discount. And the contact information on the discount ad was an out-of-state phone number that was not mine.

I puzzled about this for a bit. I attempted (and failed) to get Craigslist to remove the bogus ad. Then I decided to wake John up, because it was 1 AM and I didn’t know how serious the situation was, or what to do about it.

After some google research, we determined that the scammer was probably asking people to send him application fees, or a fee to “hold” the property (since it was supposedly such a good deal), and then he would disappear with their money. He probably is out-of-state, and probably never has (and never will) be anywhere near the actual house. And he probably has lots of fake ads up all over the country.

We determined that there really isn’t much of anything we can do about it. We can continue to try to get Craigslist to take down the scammer’s ad, and they might eventually (in a couple of weeks) do so. We can put up another ad, which people might hopefully see, that refutes the bogus ad. We could call the police, but they really aren’t set up to deal with petty internet fraud across state lines.

So at 2 AM last night, we did put up a Craigslist ad, with the same first photo, explaining the situation. And I just hope no one falls for it.

I also hope I don’t have some irate person coming to me in a week or two, thinking they had sent me money and had rented my house.

Zillow does a good job of cross checking public databases, like county records, to ensure that the houses I claim to be mine, are actually mine. But Craigslist – you can say anything you want on Craigslist. ANYTHING. And if enough people complain for enough days, they might eventually take it down.