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.

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.

Congratulations! You are purchasing your first home. It’s exciting. Maybe you have been waiting for this for a longtime. You have spent several weeks, months, years looking for a house. It’s the single most important and maybe the most expensive asset in your portfolio. Now you need to invest your time in getting the right team in place. So you made an offer and it was accepted – what next? Here are three steps you must take to protect your most valuable asset.