Party hosts, resolve to check your insurance policies

It's party season, and with New Year's Eve looming large on the calendar the Insurance Journal today advises renters and homeowners alike to check their insurance policies if they are among the nation's 28.5 million holiday party hosts.

The Journal cites a Trusted Choice study which found that most party hosts are underinsured and therefore open to financial ruin should the worst happen.

The article quotes Madelyn Flannagan of Trusted Choice: "If you host a party and your over-served guest drives away and gets in an accident, you can be held responsible."

Adding a personal umbrella policy to standard homeowner's or renter's insurance, which can provide a policy-holder with an extra $1 million or more in liability coverage, may be something to consider. Umbrella policies are typically priced at around $150 a year.

Flannagan says, "People don't buy umbrella policies because they think they have enough coverage from their homeowner and auto policies -- but they don't. The high dollar value of jury awards coupled with skyrocketing health care costs means one lawsuit can easily exceed the liability limits on the average policy."

Meanwhile, if you are a renter who doesn't have an insurance policy at all, Kiplinger's Personal Finance urges renters to take that step and protect themselves and their belongings. The magazine includes obtaining renter's insurance as one of its Five Financial Resolutions for Young Adults, published today.

Wall Street Journal says renters are gloating

Originally published in the Wall Street Journal this week, an article ran today in the Ventura County Star (California) claiming, "Amid a slump, renters gloating."

The article, which can be accessed at either website although the WSJ requires subscription registration, admits that home ownership still comes with notable advantages over renting -- including tax deductions, increased valuation long-term, and housing security.

But it also declares, "Now, with the housing market in a slump, renters who sat out the boom are finally getting some satisfaction."

It features the stories of American professionals who have decided to rent, rather than buy, their homes, including a software engineer, an economist, an information technology specialist, and an architect.

Landlords targeted by overpayment scammers

Watching the NBC-24 Toledo 11:00 newscast last night, a segment on the waning year's most widely perpetrated scams definitely caught my ear.

That's because apparently the 10th most popular scam of 2006 was one that may continue to target the property owners who offer their listings for prospective tenants to browse at www.easyrentcheck.com -- or at any other online rental vacancy search site for that matter.

Because NBC-24 doesn't yet have the story on their website, I went looking for a similar recent story from another news outlet. Sure enough Alberta, Canada's Business Edge News didn't let me down and writer Brock Ketcham details the scam and others like it here in an article published last week.

The scam begins with an e-mail to a property owner advertising an available apartment or house for rent. The person e-mailing the property owner claims to be interested in the unit but there are a few catches.

The "prospective tenant" discloses that he or she is currently living outside of the United States, and will be transferred by his or her company to the city in which the apartment or house is available. Scammers say the company will issue one large international check or money order meant to cover all the "prospective tenant's" moving expenses and housing costs. What scammers will want you to do is cash the check or money order and wire back to them the excess beyond what is needed for rent and application fees.

This might sound like a good deal at first, particularly if the person inquiring about a rental unit offers to pay for an entire year's rent up front, which many do.

But I'm going to go out on a limb -- though I feel confident that it's a pretty structurally sound one -- and state that in 100 percent of these cases, the check or money order is a fraud.

Should you actually cash a fraudulent check or money order and wire any overpayment back to the sender, you'll be out thousands of dollars. Most bank tellers, and even their supervisors, cannot tell right away that a check or money order, particularly one not printed or authorized in the United States, is a fraud. It can take days or even several weeks for the document to be declared fraudulent and bounce in your account; and by that time, the original sender will be long gone and virtually untrackable. Any money you deposited into your own account from the fraudulent check or money order will be summarily reclaimed by the bank, as it never actually existed in the first place -- and you'll owe your bank in the amount of whatever the "overpayment" was that you wired back to the original sender.

Any website and its users are open targets for scammers. Scammers are a crafty lot, and there is really no way to entirely stop them. Website administrators and Internet users can, however, take precautions.

When we first went live with www.easyrentcheck.com more than a year ago, our company e-mail addresses were almost immediately targeted by exactly the type of scam described above, and since then we've tried to take steps to discourage scammers from targeting our users.

The first, and most important, thing we wanted to do was educate our site visitors about Internet scams. While this blog post is a timely reminder, we did many months ago begin to run a series of banner ads on our site which aimed to make our users more savvy about scams. We also hoped that the appearance of ads on our site would let scammers trolling the site for victims know they weren't dealing with uninformed property owners.

You can see our most current ad here; clicking it links to here, where there are descriptions of different varieties of fake check scams. (I tried to post the image, but Blogger for some reason will not let me do it, perhaps because it is an animated .gif.)

The second thing we did was to geographically tailor our site advertising with Google, to make it just a bit less likely that international web users would find our site. Of course, anyone anywhere can find any site online if they know where to look for it, but we have elected not to make it any easier by configuring our Google-based advertising to only show up for Internet users in and around Northwest Ohio.

We at www.easyrentcheck.com are always looking for new and affordable ways to protect our users from falling victims to scammers. But we can't do it alone! When you advertise your property on our site, please be savvy about it. We advise all our landlords to only accept queries from local applicants and rental payments only in American currency, preferably only U.S.-issued money orders or checks from local banks.

Blade condemns city's lead paint lawsuit

A week ago, we reported on state legislators blocking lawsuits against former lead paint manufacturers. As anticipated, Columbus city officials rushed to file such a suit before the law could go into effect.

Columbus joins other Ohio cities that are pursuing these types of lawsuits, including Lancaster, East Cleveland and -- right here in Northwest Ohio -- Toledo.

The editorial board at the Toledo Blade today came down hard on city governments that are aiming to hold the former manufacturers of paint containing lead -- outlawed in 1978 -- responsible for the clean-up of properties still harboring the substance. You can read the Blade's editorial here.

Attracting tenants, subleasers with "photo marketing"

Whether you're a property owner seeking a tenant or a tenant yourself seeking a subleaser, today's vacancy advertising methods have largely moved to the Internet, where marketing advantages abound.

Most online listing services, in contrast to traditional newspaper classified advertising, allow you unlimited space to describe your property. No more counting words, relying on weird abbreviations or deciding if it's more important to mention the unit's brand new hardwood floors or that cats are permitted with an additional security deposit.

Additionally, most online listing services now allow advertisers to include pictures with their listings. At www.easyrentcheck.com, for example, we allow up to five photos with each listing.

Few listing services will come to your property and take photos for you (although at www.easyrentcheck.com, we will) so an advertiser is often charged with the task of photo-taking himself. And make so mistake! These photos aren't like snapping pictures of your kids at the beach or catching Grandma opening her Christmas sweater; the photos you take of your rental units are bona fide marketing tools which can make the difference between a potential tenant calling you for a viewing appointment or calling someone else. And in a competitive rental market such as we see in Ohio cities like Toledo and Fremont, you need to run photo ads that get attention instead of getting overlooked.

So says Steve Burns, real estate professional and author of the real estate investment blog Cash Flow Treasures. Burns also happens to be a professional photographer, and he shares some excellent photo tips in a recent blog post titled, "Photo Marketing Tips to Say 'Attention Buyers!'"

Burns writes, "Your ability to control light, align perspectives and create an effective composition will drastically improve the power of your photographs." To read his tips on how to do just that, click here.

It's a coup! "Time" names you person of the year

No, you're not Bill or Melinda Gates, or George Bush, or Rudy Giuliani.

But you, yes you, have something in common with them.

If you're stopping by this blog before moving on to write in your own, or if you're planning to visit YouTube or update your Myspace profile later today, or if you regularly contribute to your favorite online forum or advertise your goods and services online -- you've just been named Time magazine's 2006 Person of the Year.

Time has chosen ordinary citizens who are revolutionizing the Internet, and at the same time the concept of a global community, to wear its annually appointed badge of honor and join the likes of Giuliani, Bush and others who've earned the nod in recent years.

In last week's edition Time's editors wrote, " ... for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, Time's Person of the Year for 2006 is you."

Read the entire article and related stories at Time's website here.

And then give yourself a pat on the back.

Lawmakers block suits against lead-paint manufacturers

From Columbus Dispatch reporter Jim Siegel this morning, reporting on Ohio House and Senate votes that critics charge will weaken state consumer protection laws:

Ignoring a last-minute warning from the current and future state attorneys general that they were about to "undermine" consumer protections, the House and Senate yesterday approved a bill to cap damages available under the Consumer Sales Practices Act.

The bill, amended and passed in about 26 hours, also will effectively block anyone, including cities, from suing lead-pigment manufacturers to get them to assist with the cleanup of houses where the poisonous paint still poses a danger, especially to children.

The move is expected to prompt Columbus city officials to move quickly to file a lawsuit before the law could take effect. Gov. Bob Taft has not said whether he will veto the bill.

Before the votes, lawmakers saw a first-ever joint news release from Republican Attorney General Jim Petro and Democratic Attorney General-elect Marc Dann. It said if the bill passed, "one of the nation's best consumer protection laws will be gutted and consumers will have little protection against unscrupulous businesses who have little incentive to comply with the weakened law."

Petro and Dann said the bill would adversely affect Ohio's anti-predatory lending law, set to take effect in two weeks, which puts much of the home lending industry under the Consumer Sales Practices Act.

The bill says noneconomic damages, often awarded for pain, embarrassment or other suffering with no monetary value, are capped at $5,000 under the Consumer Sales Practices Act. It still allows for economic damages, which in a number of cases can be tripled by the court.

Republicans said that still leaves potentially big court damages.

"We have not gutted it," said Sen. David Goodman, R-New Albany. "We've done what it was originally intended to do."

An animated Speaker Jon A. Husted, R-Kettering, insisted that when they passed the predatory-lending law this spring, noneconomic damages had not been awarded before, so lawmakers did not think they were available under the Consumer Sales Practices Act.

That changed, he said, when the Ohio Supreme Court said in November that such damages were available. So the legislature felt compelled to react.

"To say we are doing anything that messes with the intent of predatory lending is false," Husted said, adding that lawmakers are adding noneconomic damages where he didn't think they existed before. "So as far as statute goes, this helps people with predatory lending more than it hurts them."

Sen. Joy Padgett, R-Coshocton, who sponsored the predatory-lending law, voted against the damage limits yesterday, saying "the changes took a few steps backwards."
Petro called the bill "a step backward that will leave Ohioans vulnerable."

Asked about Petro's statement, Husted said, "He wasn't part of the debate on the bill. He wasn't here and he didn't sit through all of this, so he doesn't know what he's talking about."

With lead paint, legislative Republicans said they were acting to stop trial lawyers from filing nuisance cases that are actually product-liability cases.

"What the plaintiffs' lawyers are doing now in the paint context is akin to trying to hold the fertilizer manufacturer responsible because the hogs stink," Rep. Bill Seitz, R-Cincinnati, said, adding that lead-based paint has been outlawed in the United States since 1978.

"Anybody should have painted their walls between 1978 and now," he said.

Most agree that cities could not win a product-liability lawsuit against paint companies, because they cannot prove who made the paint on every wall, and the statute of limitations would run out.

Rep. Mike Foley, a Cleveland Democrat and former director of the Cleveland Tenants Organization, said because the older dwellings where lead-based paint is most prevalent are often in low-rent areas, the landlord community can not afford to properly clean up the paint.

That, he and others argued, leaves local taxpayers stuck with the bill.

"Basically, we're letting the lead-paint industry off the hook for the harm they caused our children," he said.

Article here.

Ohio rent costs pinch working class families

A housing advocacy group released findings this week which show Ohioans on average must earn $12.31 an hour to afford rent for a two-bedroom apartment.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition's annual Out of Reach study concludes that even when Ohio's hourly minimum wage hikes to $6.85 in January, many Ohioans will still find themselves struggling to pay rent, particularly single residents living alone and families dependent on one wage-earner.

According to the study, the average Ohio renter makes $10.81 an hour. At that wage, a renter would have to work 46 hours per week, 52 weeks per year, in order to afford the state's average, fair market-priced, two-bedroom apartment which was calculated at $640 a month.

That's not entirely un-doable, but what about Ohioans making less than the average renter's $10.81 hourly wage?

The study found that based on Ohio's current minimum wage of $5.15 an hour a renter would have to work 96 hours a week, year-round, to afford the same two-bedroom apartment. Or, a household must include 2.4 minimum wage earners working 40 hours per week in order to make the average two-bedroom apartment affordable.

Locally, 32 percent of Toledo metropolitan area residents rent their homes and the estimated mean hourly wage for Toledo renters is $9.97.

The study concluded that Toledo area hourly wages needed to afford local fair-market rent costs are $8.42 for a studio or efficiency apartment, fair-market priced at $438 a month; $9.37 for a one-bedroom apartment, priced at $487 a month; $11.60 for a two-bedroom apartment, priced at $603 a month; and $14.96 for a three-bedroom apartment, priced at $778 a month.

Toledo's minimum-wage earners, then, even after the wage hike in January, will still find themselves unable to afford even a modest efficiency apartment.

Figures compiled for each of Ohio's counties are also available online at the coalition's Ohio study search page.

A search for Sandusky County data, for example, shows that 25 percent of the county's residents are renters and the minimum hourly wage needed to afford an average-priced one-bedroom apartment is $9.19.

In Wood County, where 29 percent of the county's residents are renters, the hourly wage required to afford an average-priced one-bedroom apartment is $9.37.

The study based its calculations on the generally accepted rule of thumb which states that "affordable housing" should make up no more than 30 percent of a wage earner's income. Data from the United States Census Bureau, HUD and the Consumer Price Index contributed to the coalition's findings.

The Cincinnati Enquirer published a story on the findings yesterday and quoted the coalition's president Sheila Crowley as stating that even a federal minimum wage increase to $7.25 an hour, as proposed by Democrats, would still leave millions of minimum-wage earners across the nation struggling to afford housing.

Crowley told the Enquirer that Americans who spend more than 30 percent of their incomes on housing have to cut costs on basic needs like food and child care to make ends meet.

"You have to juggle," she said. "You have to make adjustments -- none of them good."

Exclusive offers for new Easy Rent Check users

Did you get our holiday greeting in the mail?

We hand-picked an elite group of area landlords to receive our postcard, but if we overlooked you and you'd like to get on our mailing list, please leave your contact information in the comments section below; or, to protect your privacy, use the Contact Us form at Easy Rent Check.com.

Members of our mailing list receive occasional notices of money-saving deals and special promotions for services at Easy Rent Check.com. Members are not required to participate in these promotions, and our company does not share or sell our mailing list with anyone.

To our new users, we'd like to say: Welcome aboard! And Happy Holidays!

Dog abandoned after residents vacate

Ohio media seems not to be reporting it yet, but West Virginia outlets including the State Journal are reporting the story of a deaf, elderly boxer left to starve to death in a Belmont County, Ohio home when his owners moved out.

According to video at the news outlet's site, the 12- to 14-year-old dog was found emaciated and near death when a neighbor noticed him through a window of the empty house and called the authorities. He had no food and very little water -- in which, a large dead rat floated. The home's back door was open and the heat had been turned off; and the dog was suffering a respiratory infection.

The news story does not divulge whether the dog's owners -- who have been identified and will be charged with animal neglect -- were renters or homeowners skipping out for whatever reason, but we include this story in the Easy Rent Editor blog because it may interest landlords who allow their tenants to keep pets.

This is not the first time such stories of animal abandonment have made news, and it probably won't be the last. Easy Rent Check.com urges landlords who allow pets on their property to visit their recently vacated units soon after tenants move out. It shouldn't be your responsibility to make sure your former tenants take their pets with them, of course, but since similar cases of animal abandonment aren't as rare as you might think, we guess it's less uncomfortable to deal with your local dog warden or humane society than it is to remove a dead animal from your property.

Auditors comply with new Ohio landlord law

Local county auditors' offices are making it easier for landlords to comply with Substitute House Bill 294, enacted in September.

The law aims to make it easier for officials to contact landlords in the event of an emergency on their properties and it eliminates cases of "missing landlords" who cannot be found to address nuisance issues at their rental sites.

It requires all landlords to register their contact information with county auditors and, in the case of an out-of-state landlord, to appoint an in-state agent to serve as a contact person.

Local county auditors in many cases have made available printable versions of the HB 294 contact forms on their websites. Landlords who have not yet complied with the law may follow the links below to the appropriate county auditors' sites and print a form for mailing.

• Lucas County Auditor's Office, form here.
• Wood County Auditor's Office, form here.
• Sandusky County Auditor's Office, please pick up a form at 100 N. Park Ave. Suite 228 in Fremont.
• Seneca County Auditor's Office, form here.
• Hancock County Auditor's Office, form here.

Meanwhile, the Youngstown-based Vindicator newspaper is reporting that legislators are already considering watering down the measure and revising it to require only landlords owning four or more rental units to submit the proper contact forms. Easy Rent Check.com, however, advises all landlords to comply with the law as it is currently stipulated.

Corp offers web-based property management

Daily Business News reported today that DIY Real Estate Solutions, Inc., has unveiled a low-cost, web-based property management software program for landlords and property managers.

Managers and owners who take advantage of the software will be able to track vacancies, move-ins, delinquencies and financial data without having to buy or download expensive software program packages since the process is entirely web-based and available any time a user is online.

DIY is currently offering a free 30-day trial at its website, http://www.diyresolutions.com/.

Cuyahoga Falls investor buys 4 Toledo properties

The Toledo Blade today reported that four local apartment complexes have been purchased by a Cuyahoga Falls real estate investor who plans to spend $4 million on improvements.

The article cites Lucas County Auditor's office records which show that Daniel E. Karam and his Karam Managed Properties purchased Miracle Manor, Sunny Dale Estates, Abbey Run and Hunter's Ridge earlier this month.

Toledoans may recall that Miracle Manor, at Laskey and Jackman roads, has been the site of two major fires in the past three years.

Karam stated to the Blade that he spent $19 million to acquire the complexes. The purchase adds nearly 1,000 individual units to his real estate portfolio, which includes 5,000 other units in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

BG students go to court over secuity deposits

The BG News, campus paper for Bowling Green State University, today published an article revealing that in the past two years there have been 14 student lawsuits over security deposits filed against BG landlords, including five against the owners of Copper Beech Townhouses.

Students have claimed that their security deposits were withheld erroneously at the end of their leases.

At issue in at least one Copper Beech case was the company's requirement that tenants hire a professional carpet cleaner before vacating the property. The requirement seems to be at odds with Ohio law which, according to BG News writer Cassandra Shofar, states, "tenants are not responsible for normal 'wear and tear' on a residence. You cannot be held accountable for cleaning costs unless the cleaning required is excessive or constitutes some sort of damage. For example, you cannot be charged for carpet cleaning, unless you damaged the carpet."

The article cites a similar case against Winthrop Terrace, in which a security deposit was withheld from a student for carpet cleaning. The 2005 case, Shofar reports, was dismissed and Winthrop returned the student's full deposit.

Bowling Green students are offered two pieces of advice in order to avoid disagreements about their security deposits: Document all of the rental's flaws and items of disrepair upon moving in, and take advantage of the university's Student Legal Services both when signing a lease and again later, if disagreements arise.

The 10 best real estate books of 2006

Pondering Christmas gifts for the real estate professional on your shopping list?

Consider the advice of Robert Bruss, real estate writer for the Naples News in Florida, who recently offered up his list of the 10 best real estate books of 2006.

Topping the list is a book which, not surprisingly, pays homage to Donald Trump.

"Trump-Style Negotiation," by George Ross, the mogul's own trusted advisor, reveals the real estate negotiation tactics which have made Trump one of the most successful real estate professionals ever. The book cites the details of actual Trump accquisitions and is published by John Wiley and Sons.

The rest of the list:

2. “The Automatic Millionaire Homeowner,” by David Bach (Broadway Books, New York).
3. “Buy Even Lower,” by Scott Frank and Andy Heller (Kaplan Publishing Co., Chicago).
4. “Real Estate Debt Can Make You Rich,” by Steve Dexter (McGraw-Hill, New York).
5. “Bubbles, Booms, and Busts; Make Money in Any Real Estate Market,” by Blanche Evans (McGraw-Hill, New York).
6. “Success as a Real Estate Agent for Dummies,” by Dirk Zeller (Wiley Publishing Co., Indianapolis, IN).
7. “Everything You Need to Know Before Buying a Co-Op, Condo, or Townhouse,” by Ken Roth (AMACOM Publishing, New York).
8. “Who Says You Can’t Buy a Home?” by David Reed (AMACOM Publishing, New York).
9. “Confessions of a Real Estate Entrepreneur,” by James A. Randel (McGraw-Hill, New York).
10. “The Reverse Mortgage Advantage,” by Warren Boroson (McGraw-Hill, New York).

Honorable mentions in the Bruss column go to, among others, “Find it, Fix it, Flip it!” by Michael Corbett (Plume Books-Penguin Group) and “Landlording on Auto-Pilot,” by Mike Butler (John Wiley and Sons).

Visit your local bookseller to shop for these titles; or visit http://www.amazon.com or http://www.barnesandnoble.com for convenient online ordering.

Ohio's smoking ban exempts residences

Tomorrow, the statewide smoking ban voters approved in November will go into effect.

The Canton Repository has published a nice Q & A about the ban, and reminds us that smoking is still legally permitted in private residences, including rented homes and apartments.

Landlords, however, are not required to allow smoking in their units. The Ohio Civil Rights Commission does not consider "non-smoking" stipulations to be discriminatory.

The Editor's prediction: Expect before long an argument to be made that apartments in multi-unit buildings should not be exempt from the ban because smoke can travel from individual units into hallways, which can be reasonably described as public spaces.

Real estate and the Internet surge

Never mind the fact that 99 percent of this Yahoo article is an advertisement for a Houston-based real estate developer.

After all, it was written by PR Newswire. That's what they do.

So, Northwest Ohioans, never mind that for a minute and instead note this little nugget:

The article cites research from the National Association of Realtors which reports that an estimated 77 percent of home buyers used the internet to search for a home in 2005, compared to only 2 percent just one decade ago.

This usage reflects a remarkable 3,750 percent increase in just 10 years.

While the association's 2006 report is specific to home buyers, it follows that prospective renters are also using the internet in large numbers to search for their next home.

The most recent research I have on renters' online search habits is from a May, 2005 Nielson NetRatings report which combined prospective renters and buyers into one sample group and concluded that in the six months prior to the study, 21.6 million web surfers visited a real estate or apartment search web site -- representing a 26-percent spike in just that short time period alone.

Interestingly, in that time period the greatest web traffic increase to real estate and apartment search web sites was at the keyboards of lower-income surfers earning not more than $25,000 a year. That group's internet-based home searching jumped 47 percent, according to the NetRatings report.

Whether you are selling or renting out property, the time has come to ask yourself: How many potential buyers or would-be tenants are you failing to reach if you're not advertising online?