Nov 25

There is a revision to the 1099 link:

Kim here from Best Accounting Software.

I noticed a broken link on this page – http://justalandlord.com/2011-irs-form-1099-revisions/

The IRS now has a section for self-employed individuals with all sorts of tax guidance, perhaps you’d like to update your page to point people to – https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/self-employed-individuals-tax-center

In 2010 two laws revised the 1099 requirements  effective for payments made after 1/1/11 ( 2012 tax year)

The 2010 Small Business Act extends the 1099 requirement to all rental property owners. Prior to 1/1/2011 small rental property owners were exempted from the aw.  It appears very unlikely that this provision will be reverted.

The 2010 National Health Care Reform Act P.L. 111-148 (a.k.a. Obamacare) extended the 1099 requirement to all purchases of GOODS (previously the requirement applied only to services.) This bill also eliminates the exemption for if the party you paid was a corporation. An attempt to reverse this portion of the Health Care Bill in December failed, but now that evenPresident Obama is considering fixing parts of it, so it may change.

Do you use small Contractors in your business or to perform repairs?

If so the 1099s you file may cause the IRS and state taxing authorities to reclassify those “contractors” as “statutory employees.”  This can be hugely expensive with fines up to Continue reading »

May 12

The AASEW has done a lot of great things for the industry and sustainable rental housing.

One that benefited many owners was the change to Sheriff moves to eliminate the mover, which is a large portion of the costs.  

Our attorneys, working against their own personal interest, changed the law to allow LLCs to be represented by a member or agent, rather than requiring an attorney. This saves a lot of money as well as making the case less confrontational.

Here are the laws passed through the work of the AASEW in:

2018  https://bit.ly/3bryZ0Y
2016  https://bit.ly/2Lj7NXM
2014  https://bit.ly/3dCRRM1
2012  https://bit.ly/2zx3NQZ

It is important that we work together as an industry for the betterment of all.

Jul 01

List of  Wisconsin Landlord Tenant Law changes

 

There have been a lot of questions lately regarding which Wisconsin landlord tenant laws have been changed in recent years. Below is a list of state law changes since 2011.

The Association’s Landlord Tenant Law Boot Camp is a good way to learn how to implement these changes in your rental procedures.    It is a full Saturday of intense information.  Attorney Tristan Pettit, AASEW Board Member and the guy who drafts the standard forms you get at WI Legal Blank is the presenter.  Tristan sat at the table as a lot of this was drafted.

Many of the changes were promoted by the Apartment Association of Southeastern WI, Inc., which I have been a board member of for all but one of the last 30 years.  You should consider membership so that we can continue these good works. 😉  Join at https://AASEW.org

While portrayed by some as anti tenant, it is the good tenants who meet their obligations who ultimately pay for those tenants that don’t pay or are disruptive.

Some changes were just common sense and benefit both owners and tenants.  Previously, you could only give a month to month tenant a 14 Day notice without right to cure for lease violations.  Now you use a 5 Day Breach to clean up their garbage or get rid of that  one hundred pound Pit Bull – Rottweiler that is chasing the mail carrier down the block. If the tenant complies, their rental continues.

Another example was the change to waiver.  For a while the tenant advocate attorneys would raise the issue of waiver if you had waited until, lets say the 15th, to give a five day.  Then you get tired of constant late payments and issue a five day on the fifth. The argument was raised that by waiting until the 15th that you changed the terms of the agreement.  Owners responded by adopting a no leniency policy, giving everyone a five day on the fifth.  Now that this has changed owners have the option of giving tenants extra time before issuing a notice, remembering that notices appear more confrontational that a note reminding them rent is due.


2017 ACT 317

 

2017 Wis. Act 317

https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/2017/related/lcactmemo/act317

Summary by Tenant Resource Center


2015 ACT 176

 

2015 Wis. Act. 176

https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/2015/related/lcactmemo/act176

Tenant Resource Center Summary of 3/2/16 Changes


2013 ACT 76

 

2013 Wisconsin Act 76

2013 Wisconsin Act 76 Evictions, Towing Practices, and Prohibitions 

Tenant Resource Center Summary of 3/1/2014 Wisconsin Law Changes 


2011 ACT 143

 

2011 Wis. Act 143

2011 Wisconsin Act 143: LC Act Memo

Tenant Resource Center Summary of 3/31/2012 Wisconsin Law Changes


2011 ACT 108

 

2011 Wis. Act 108

2011 Wisconsin Act 108: LC Act Memo


I think this is the full list

 

Jun 17

I had seen this years ago and then forgot about it until I ran into it this morning while searching for something.

A real wealth of info, of course much of it slanted towards tenants rights. Some of it is outdated, such as the eviction notice grid does not contain 5 Day Breach for Month to Month.

We should work to get eviction prevention (very different than eviction defense) as part of this, as well as more tenant responsibility focused pieces.

Eviction prevention is providing the resources and tools necessary for tenants to succeed. When tenants fail, landlords suffer or fail.

http://wilawlibrary.gov/topics/landlord.php

 

Jul 31

https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/healthy_homes/smokefree

This rule is helpful for private owners who wish to ban smoking, as well as offering a marketing opportunity, I guess, for owners that permit smoking.

I agree with HUD on this, the advantages of smoke-free housing outweigh any market advantage of allowing smoking.

https://archives.hud.gov/news/2016/pr16-184.cfm

HUD’s smoke-free rule will reduce damage and maintenance costs associated with smoking. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), HUD’s national smoke-free policy will save public housing agencies $153 million every year in repairs and preventable fires, including $94 million in secondhand smoke-related health care, $43 million in renovation of smoking-permitted units, and $16 million in smoking-related fire losses. It is estimated that smoking causes more than 100,000 fires each year nationwide, resulting in more than 500 deaths and nearly a half a billion dollars in direct property damage.

Feb 01

You now are required to install 10 year sealed battery smoke detectors in Milwaukee. We have the law in a large part because Kiddie, the smoke detector manufacturer,  lobbied hard in Milwaukee for the law.

The sales literature claims the life to be ten years from the activation. Now if the ten year detectors actually worked for ten years, without being removed, disabled, or the battery dying they would be a bargain for owners compared to replacing batteries once a year.  However, will they?  I doubt it.

The marketing of a ten year detector may in fact cause more problem as home owners and perhaps some landlords will think ‘Okay, this January 2018, I’ll make a note on my calendar to replace the detectors in December 2027.’ and not continue to check them annually at least.

 

Let’s be clear: You still need to check the ten year units, just as you did with the regular units.

A worrisome fact is they have an “off” selector that drains the battery and permanently disables  the unit. From their literature

 

Q: How do I disable my alarm?
A: Remove the alarm from the mounting plate by rotating it counterclockwise (as indicated by the arrows on the cover of the alarm). Next, on the back side of the alarm, locate the area marked with a long arrow on the product label. Break through the label with a screw driver and turn the screw to the “OFF” position. This will deactivate the alarm, stop the end-of-life warning and render the alarm safe for disposal by draining the battery.
IMPORTANT: Deactivation of the alarm is permanent. Once the alarm has been deactivated, it cannot be reactivated or mounted back onto the mounting plate and will no longer detect smoke or carbon monoxide. This is why it’s imperative to replace your alarm immediately.
The ten year warranty only covers repair or replacing the unit, not the damage caused by them failing to work in a fire seven years from now,  your labor to replace them or even the postage to and from the manufacturer.  Some highlights of one warranty:

 

The obligation of [manufacturer] under this warranty is limited to repairing or replacing the alarm or any part which we find to be defective in material, workmanship or design, free of charge, upon receiving the alarm with proof of date of purchase, postage and return postage prepaid,
 
 In no event shall the Manufacturer be liable for loss of use of this product or for any indirect, special, incidental or consequential damages, or costs, or expenses incurred by the consumer or any other user of this product, whether due to a breach of contract, negligence, strict
liability in tort or otherwise.
 
The Manufacturer shall have no liability for any personal injury, property damage or any special, incidental, contingent or consequential damage of any kind resulting from gas leakage, smoke, fire or explosion.
Jul 13
Below is the Apartment Association of Southeastern WI’s legislative alert regarding a proposed Milwaukee County Rent Abatement ordinance

Dear AASEW Members:
  .
The Milwaukee County Board is considering a proposal that would permit your tenants to abate rent for maintenance issues not addressed within 24 hours.
  .
For example, your tenant calls on Friday morning to say the bathroom faucet is not working correctly.  You go out and fix it on Sunday, 50 hours after the call came in.  This proposal would allow that tenant to deduct $200 from the rent – Yes! Under this proposal, the tenant can deduct TWO HUNDRED dollars even though you made a timely repair of a minor item that does not affect health or safety. 
  .
  .
There will be a hearing on this proposal at 9:00 AM Monday, July 17th, 2017 at the County Board Committee Hearing Room at the Milwaukee County Courthouse, 901 North 9th Street, RM 201B, Milwaukee, WI 53233 Phone: 414-278-4222.  Ironically this is two floors below the eviction courtroom where the legitimacy of each deduction will be decided.
  .
I encourage you to attend.  If you cannot attend you can still make an impact by reaching out to your County Supervisor and/or County Executive Chris Abele to let them know the potential negative impact of this proposal on both you as the property owner and on your tenants.  If you live in one of their districts please make an extra effort to contact your supervisor and attend.  Constituents of the supervisors make a bigger impact when in attendance.
  .
Who represents me?
           Here is the link to look up your County Supervisor:
           Here is the link for County Executive Chris Abele:
  .
Here are some talking points to help you get started when making your call.
  • How is maintenance even directly related to evictions?
  • Who will be responsible for verifying maintenance issues?  At what cost? In what time frame?
  • What is the plan if the issues are deemed inaccurate?
  • Cost of these abatements and the court costs to fight them will be passed on to good tenants
  • There is a risk of tenants seeing these types of abatements as a means to avoid paying legitimate rent.
  • This proposed system is just another layer of cost to the city
  • There are already programs in place to protect tenants through the Department of Neighborhood Services (DNS).  Why add this? If the current system is not working, why not improve what we have rather than create a new layer of bureaucracy and cost.
  • Evictions are not a result of non-repair, but a result of non-payment
  • This proposal will increase evictions, not decrease them.
Many of the tenants featured in the news surrounding the Eviction Defense Project (Milwaukee) are serial evictees.  This type of evictee increases the rents of good tenants; repeated court costs, employee time, and loss of rent will cause rents to rise.
 .
There are bigger issues to be addressed regarding evictions in Milwaukee.  We need to be looking at ways for landlords to be better landlords and tenants to be better tenants.  Many want to blame housing for all the problems in our communities.  A better approach for both housing and for the tenants that find themselves in eviction would be to look at the underlying cause of the tenant’s failure to pay rent and have both financial assistance and social intervention to make their future tenancies successful. Housing isn’t the problem, it’s part of the solution.  The money would be better spent on education, neighborhood programs, and increased police protection.
  .
The AASEW applauds efforts to reduce evictions as they are time-consuming and costly for the owners as well as negatively impacting the housing stock and the tenants.
Take action today; contact your supervisor or attend the meeting on Monday (7/17/17).
 .
Sincerely,
Ron Hegwood
AASEW President
Jan 20

Here is a link to a mold remediation infographic published by American Apartment Owners Association.  It contains some practical ideas and may be a good future reference.

 

Jan 07

Recently the Milwaukee Journal ran a series “Landlord Games” that inaccurately portrayed LLCs as being used simply to avoiding paying property taxes and fines.  The result is the Milwaukee Common Council is creating a committee to study LLCs and rental housing. Text of proposal. The rental industry is again, noticeably absent from those invited to the table.

View as formatted pdf with footnotes

Let’s agree that all property owners pay a cost when someone fails to pay their taxes or their property is foreclosed and abandoned.

The Apartment Association does not support bad actors. None of those owners featured in the Journal article are members of the Association.

Rather we see the importance of the city, and private investors working together to make rental housing, and therefore neighborhoods, succeed for the mutual good of both.

Rental housing is an important and integral element of Milwaukee. About 58% of the residents of Milwaukee are tenants. In some neighborhoods, such as 53233 the number of renters exceeds 97%. The success or failure of neighborhoods and rental housing are closely tied.

Rental Housing is the largest small business in Milwaukee with over $7 billion invested in Milwaukee. (MPROP assessor records October 2015) Rental properties account for well over a half billion dollars a year of economic impact, starting with $190 million in property taxes, sewer and water charges, maintenance, insurance and everything else that goes into running rental housing. The Census Bureau found the yearly median operating costs per unit for multifamily rental properties vary between $3,600 per unit for small properties and $5,170 per unit for large properties, adjusted to 2016 dollars. These numbers exclude interest and mortgage servicing.

Providing rental housing in older, poorer neighborhoods is difficult, challenging and unappreciated work. Many have failed, some are opportunists or worse, but the majority were simply overwhelmed financially and mentally by the task at hand.

Owners are impacted by the financial and social problems of their tenants, the high costs of maintenance and lack of capital to address those problems. It is not the owner’s lifestyle that contributes to insect infestations or broken windows, yet it is the owner and not the occupant that is accountable both financially and recently in the media.

Not only do private owners suffer these burdens. One only needs to look at the long history of failure among Milwaukee’s nonprofit housing providers. (see excerpt below) These groups had every advantage over the small private investor. They had significant financial resources, typically through Block Grant and other government funding and grants; they had well-paid and well-educated staff; they often obtaining properties without costs, and they had access to the best tenants on Rent Assistance. Nearly all of Milwaukee’s nonprofit housing providers failed financially.

These groups had every advantage over the small private investor. They had significant financial resources, typically through Block Grant and other government funding and grants; they had well-paid and well-educated staff; they often obtaining properties without costs, and they had access to the best tenants on Rent Assistance. Nearly all of Milwaukee’s nonprofit housing providers failed financially.

Or one could look at the Milwaukee’s Housing Authority budget to see the costs they incur housing low-income Milwaukeeans. Here too is an organization that gets Rent Assistance tenants, tenants who risk losing their housing subsidy if they fail to comply with the rules or pay their rent. HACM does not rent to the populations with bad histories, leaving the segment most in need of housing to the private sector.

Milwaukee should strive to encourage a successful private rental housing market in this once great city, but since the mid-1980s’ the city adopted a culture of hatred towards private rental owners. That has not produced positive results, but instead, discourages the right people from participating.

If Milwaukee rental housing became more sustainable, where people willing to invest their time and money were to make reasonable profits, it would be harder for the few charlatans to exist because of increased competition for available properties. An added benefit is more interest in investing in Milwaukee’s rental housing will result in an increase in values and therefore an increase in the tax base.

Alderman Witkowski, who is the co-author of this proposal, created a Local Business Action Team to help small business succeed. Rental housing is the largest segment of small business within the city and one that may have the greatest impact on the well-being of the city. With our half billion dollars a year of economic impact, a similar effort should be undertaken towards making private rental housing more successful.

Let’s look at the recent Journal Sentinel series on landlords.

This investigative reporting – using easily available public records – showed that the individual owners behind LLCs could be revealed and that other properties owned by these individuals or different LLCs could also be exposed. Changes in the LLC laws are not necessary, contrary to the assertions of Aldermen Murphy and Witkowski that bad landlords are operating in secret. The City Attorney’s office has recently been successful in having a receiver appointed for the various ownership entities used by inner city landlord

Within existing laws, the city could have caused most of the featured landlords out of business, through docketing and enforcing code enforcement fines, and foreclosing f tax delinquencies. For whatever reason the city allowed these owners to continue unabated.

Perhaps most troubling is the relentless attack on James H. Herrick, who works for Baird, that went as far as the Mayor calling for the guy to be fired. He is not a member of the Association nor known to us.

The Journal reports that inspectors show up and find basement doors illegally padlocked. In the article, the owner’s manager states he did this in an attempt to keep drug dealers from entering the property.

There is no argument that inoperable fire doors are an unreasonable risk to occupants. Clearly, this was a novice mistake made by someone who did not understand fire codes.

The correct response by DNS would be for the inspector to explain the problem and demand the owner’s rep immediately remove the padlocks. If the owner did not comply, the Department of Neighborhood Services has an essential services program where the city can contract a repair and then bill the owner.

Instead, the inspection supervisor chose to placard the building and force 50 families out onto the street. Closing a 50 unit building would not have been the DNS response had the property been located on the Eastside, Bayview or the Southwest side. In these more affluent neighborhood they would have compelled a solution that kept the tenants safely in their homes.

But this building is in a poor, minority neighborhood.  The city’s response was harsh as it typically is in these neighborhoods. The DNS employees who acted out of spite towards the owners and a disregard of the tenant population, instead of attempting to protect the homes of 50 low income, primarily minority tenants, should lose their jobs.

The 50 unit building remained closed for a couple of months. It is no surprise that the building ended in foreclosure and sold at a distressed price due to this.

The owner’ use of single property LLCs, in this case, were an advantage to the city. Because the owner had his properties in separate LLCs, this allowed only this one to be foreclosed upon, instead of all 13.

It is a lending industry practice in larger real estate deals to require single asset entities to separate liability from one project and others with a similar ownership interest.

It would actually be in Milwaukee’s best interest if every investment property was in a properly segregated LLC. That way a failure at one property would not have a domino effect and bring down perhaps dozens or more other properties that are under similar ownership.

Then the Journal and Mayor put pressure on Baird, Herrick’s employer, placing his job in jeopardy. What advantage does the city receive in this? If he loses his job, his remaining properties will likely fall into financial problems as well, resulting in more boarded buildings, displaced tenants, and distressed sales.

Similarly, what did the city gain by the public attack on NBA basketball star Devin Harris? While it may have been expedient in causing the payment of some fines and taxes, overall it sent a clear warning to others with capital “Do not invest in Milwaukee. If you fail, you will be ridiculed and perhaps lose your career.” Similar results could have been obtained with a private conversation with Harris, thereby not discouraging outside investment.

Journal article on non-profit failures

West End joins a list of other nonprofit housing organizations that have failed in the last 10 years, including Walker’s Point Development Corp., East Side Housing Action Coalition and Community Development, and the Westside Conservation Corp.

 

Sep 24

If your business model relies on using workers that you classify as “independent contractors” the latest interpretation from the US Department of Labor should be of extreme concern you.

Hat tip to Attorney Tristan Pettit for alerting me to this.

I have written a number of post about the dangers of calling a worker an independent contractor when they met the definition of employee.   Well that bar was just raised substantially.

Rather than the old tests, the new ones are fairly bright line:

Ultimately, the goal is not simply to tally which factors are met, but to determine whether the worker is economically dependent on the employer (and thus its employee) or is really in business for him or herself (and thus its independent contractor).

But the ruling goes even further than is the worker dependent on the pay they receive from you.  Below are a few paragraphs of the Department of Labor document worth noting.

If the work performed by a worker is integral to the employer’s business, it is more likely that the worker is economically dependent on the employer.

 

In sum, in order to inform the determination of whether the worker is in business for him or herself, this factor should not focus on the worker’s ability to work more hours, but rather on whether the worker exercises managerial skills and whether those skills affect the worker’s opportunity for both profit and loss.

 

The worker should make some investment (and therefore undertake at least some risk for a loss) in order for there to be an indication that he or she is an independent business.

 

For example, investing in tools and equipment is not necessarily a business investment or a capital expenditure that indicates that the worker is an independent contractor.

So if the guy is a licensed electrician doing work for dozens or hundreds of other owners – pretty much he is a contractor.

However if you are paying a painter $10 an hour, or even $20 for that matter, and he works primarily for you – he is an employee and you would be well served to consider making him a legitimate employee or hire out a company that uses employees.

Remember too that if someone working on your property  is injured your rental property liability policy will not cover them.  Either you or they need to have a worker comp policy.  And this risk is even greater than the DOJ coming after you.

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