Reena Gulati Blog

1. Don’t wait. Often during the course of the tenancy, the tenant falls behind in rent or is a habitual offender and fails to pay rent in a timely manner. You as the landlord hope that it will come any day or the next week, as promised. If the tenant is behind in rental payments, the landlord should start a legal proceeding to evict immediately. In most circumstances waiting any longer is almost always detrimental to the landlord. This is because the law requires that adequate notice must be provided to the tenant prior to evicting them, which causes further delays in evicting the nonpaying tenant. The landlord continues to loose time and additional rent.

My client’s grandmother passed away without a will. Therefore under New York law the client inherits the house and the investment property of her grandmother. That’s great except at the time of death the house was owned by the grandmother and her mother, the great grandmother.

Have you ever experienced attempting to refinance or obtain a loan only to find there is judgment against your name or your business? Do you believe that the judgment is erroneous? Or that the incorrect entity has been sued? Often the business owner does not find out about the judgment until service of a Marshal’s Notice. In these instances the business owner either never received proper notice of the lawsuit or failed to respond to a complaint and a default judgment was entered against the business owner.

Often I get inquiries from potential clients who are in the process of employing a contractor to renovate their homes, asking if they should have a formal contract with the contractor. In a couple of instances the clients' projects were worth several hundred thousand dollars and they had no written contract with the contractor. However the homeowners didn’t feel comfortable turning over tens of thousands of dollars over to the contractor at the very beginning of the project without an agreement and hence they called us.

In this economy a lot of people either prefer to start their own business or are compelled to because of the current job market and decide to take the plunge into the realm of being a business owner. This is your window of opportunity. Wonderful! Now let’s be smart about it.