Our agreement is iron clad legally. If there is any illegal activity, we can tell them to leave. Consult an attorney in your area, and try to have it classified under the innkeeper statutes. One of the things that qualifies it as an inn is that regular maid service is provided.
We also ask how many guests will be sleeping overnight, and adjust the price for the additional cleanup and laundry. If we go over and there is an obvious party going on, we put the brakes on it, or just keep it within reason. We have had guests that have thrown parties for all sorts of things with a lot of people there. You just have to use your discretion, and it is easy to see the difference between 30 people there for a reunion and 30 people there drinking and puking all over the place. You can easily read people. And you can easily count how many people are staying overnight. And if there's a question, you just throw the breaker and go in and see. Remember, though, they have to ask you in.
If it is important enough to call the police or fire department, we need to talk about things.
HTH, but check things in YOUR area. Then tapdance within the lines.
Steve
Heart surgery pending? Read up and prepare. Learn how to care for a friend. Download the book.
Naw, field mice won't hurt anything. Used to have them every year at the first cold spell - they were just trying to get warm. Believe me, they'd rather live in the field anyway - especially after we got a cat.
The largest wind insurance company (at least according to yesterday's Miami Herald) is already the state-owned company. Most others have trimmed back as fast as the state will let them.
The Judge is a POS. It has such recoil that most people cannot shoot it safely. It is inaccurate. It is a small hand held cannon for people with short weenies. A real pump shotgun is a good home defense weapon. You don't even have to aim, just point it towards the noise. And a round over their head works wonders. The sound of one being jacked is magnified about
7x in the dark. And shotgun pellets don't travel far and kill someone ten blocks away. Or three rooms away.Even if you severely screw up and hit the ground, they will do damage to several people.
MHO, Ymmv, and all that stuff.
My favorite intimidation weapon is my Ithaca Featherlight sawed off 16 ga.
18.5 inch barrel, of course. Lanyard to the pistol grip, hung around the neck, and easily concealed in a coat. #2 pellets.
Or shut off the gas and call the gas company and tell them you smelled gas. They won't turn it back on until they thoroughly check the premises, and at that time, you have access as owner, and will probably have to sign off on the work order. Most public service employees are required to report any presence of drugs, illegal firearms, child abuse, child neglect, mostly anything out of the ordinary that you can have them arrested for, and you, as property owner would have probable cause to report such observances during said inspection for the source of the gas leak.
Me and my buddy GB repair AC units for this nice lady who owns a few rental houses. When she has a tenant who is chronically late or fails to pay rent, she pulls and takes the AC unit disconnect plug from the box with her. It's funny how the heating and cooling quit working when an HVAC package unit loses power when the insert is out of the safety disconnect. :-)
A recent news report showed a 5'2" woman (weighing, at most, 110 pounds), got off several shots from a Judge at some would-be robbers. The adrenaline surge turned her into Superwoman. - didn't even flinch.
Still,
A "round over their heads?" You're worried about killing someone "ten blocks away?" Or "three rooms away?"
Anyone who has contemplated having the proper tools on hand (or has attended training from a competent instructor) will tell you that a shotgun is what you want. I have a pump shotgun with a 18 1/8" barrel for personal protection in the home.
A friend inherited a bunch of rental properties in a tourist area. She had to hire a management company because she doesn't live in that area. So when a lighbulb burns out the renter calls the management company who dispatches an electrician to change the bulb and she gets a bill for $185.00.
You can be so stupid sometimes, yet lucid at others. Have you ever been duck hunting, and someone put some shot over your head? The sound gets your attention. And the shot loses velocity really quickly, hitting you with about as much force as a common BB from an air rifle at fifty feet. The "three rooms away" thing was in reference to YOUR mention of using slugs in the .410, which has to be around a 200 grain slug.
Do try to keep up.
Do you actually own any guns?
PS: Victims are at the barrel end of the gun. I'm on the trigger end. And there ARE videos out there of little women getting a new part in their hairline from handgun recoil.
HTH, but I doubt it.
Steve
Heart surgery pending? Read up and prepare. Learn how to care for a friend. Download the book.
A young couple may want to buy a home, but first they want to see if they can make a living. So rent the home to them, and give the couple the option to buy it out from you at some future point.
That type of couple is liable to be more motivated in preserving the property for future purchase than a renter who plans to just pack and leave in a year or two.
The difference there is called consent... The persons paying for alarm monitoring service which allows an agent of the central monitoring station to speak to them through the installed alarm equipment grants consent for that to occur in the monitoring agreement -- said agreement doesn't allow for the landlord or any one else to tap into said equipment to listen to or intercept the authorized and consented to communications or using the installed facilities to perform any sort of snooping as the consent for the monitoring station to use that communication channel is only granted during an alarm event per the agreement... Discovery of the any of the taps would be sufficient prima facie evidence that you tapped into the system, no expert witnesses needed... Just the testimony from the alarm installer that such devices were not installed when the system was commissioned and the tenant stating that you are the only other entity with unrestricted access to the premises... Civil court is by persuasiveness of the evidence and inferring an explanation which would favor your side of the case, not by proving anything beyond a reasonable doubt, just by providing more evidence than the other side which is determined reliable by the jury (or judge if a bench trial)...
In that case if they are also in non-payment mode on your rent, the fact that they failed to pay their own gas bill is demonstrative of a pattern of conduct of non-payment of bills... That would be a check mark in your win column as far as evidence goes...
Because the power company and the water company are not in the business of renting properties... They just distribute their service to the community until a customer is in delinquency...
You can not collect rent on a unit which is no longer provided with such utilities because of some action you took...
It is because you as the landlord are taking on the burden of supplying the utility service and then creating a bill for your tenant each month for that out of pocket cost... You can not knowingly lease a residential unit which does not have access to those utilities, so the moment YOU have those utilities disconnected because your tenant fails to reimburse you for them, YOU are no longer entitled to rent because you no longer have a legally rentable unit due to an action you willfully took...
If the tenant is a deadbeat and fails to pay the utility bills in their own name and those services get disconnected by the utility, then that is independent evidence from a disinterested 3rd party to the rental contract dispute at issue in the eviction proceedings and definitely evidence of a pattern of conduct of non-payment of their financial commitments...
I bought a .380 because I was applying for a carry permit and a 16 gauge would have been awkward to carry around in a ankle holster. (-: This was way back in the day when money (for me) was pretty scarce and it was "either-or." I had to make do with a weapon that could be both carried discreetly and used for home defense. A couple of well-placed shots from a .380 will take out a fat man or a thin one unless he's wearing a bulletproof welder's helmet. One or two shots up through the jaw will do it. Very little bone between the barrel and the brain.
But I will agree that a .380 is not an intimidation weapon, it is a weapon of last resort. I wouldn't shoot a 300 pound man in a leather jacket in the center of mass and expect good results. I'd aim for the head and pray he wasn't a relative of Joe the Boss Masseria, the man who could dodge bullets:
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He eventually ran out of luck and died in a hail of .32 and .38 caliber slugs. As someone else noted, the Mob has historically made very effective use of the .22 caliber round as a murder weapon. It all depends on how you use it.
Ironically, the only time I had to depend on my .380, displaying it was enough. The guy on the other end weaved his head from side to side to try to determine if it was a real gun (it's pretty damn small) and ran away when he concluded it was. It was good for him that he just moved side to side because I had already decided he was close enough to grab it from me and if he moved forward even an inch, I would have shot him. And emptied the clip.
Eventually I graduated from the Beretta to a Browning 9mm HiPower. There's no way that the Browning was anywhere near as conceable as the Beretta, although it had tremendously greater power as well as a 13 round clip v. the Beretta's 7. It had substantially greater intimidation power as well. Now I have a .40 Glock, a Ruger mini 14 and a few others around the house.
I still prefer a pistol to a shotgun for really tight quarters but for carry purposes, a Baby Browning .25 with 7 rounds of steel-tipped ammo is enough gun for most situations. At least for me. As someone else said a while back, a powerful gun that's too big to take everywhere is no better than a small caliber gun than can go anywhere. Escape is still preferable to a shootout, at least for me. The Baby is for when escape is not an option. Even a justifiable shooting is going to cost big bucks, especially if you're arrested as a result. But being arrested is still a lot better than being dead.
I believe that it's the preponderance of evidence, as in "more likely than not" whereas criminal court requires guilt to be established beyond reasonable doubt. In any event, it's moot. We've decided renting is not worth the hassle in our jurisdiction because the deck is stacked against landlords in a number of ways. We're going to arrange for a house-sitter instead. Thanks for all your input. Most enlightening.
I carry two guns. In addition to my regular concealed gun (a CZ-82), I have a fold-up .22, five-shot, single action revolver that I keep in my back pocket. It's a "Back Up Gun (BUG)". Our local range has BUG matches, and you'd be surprised at the devastation some of these BUGs can cause to a paper target!
Yes, that's an interesting way to do things. But I worry that the incentive to not destroy the property would disappear if the tenants discover you're selling it to someone else. From what little I know of such situations, "rent to buy" tenants always believe they've built up equity, even if they haven't been able to bring their FICO score up enough to qualify for a mortgage or save enough to cover down payments and closing costs.
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