The Davidian Post – Food & Politics

Graffiti is painted on your Shopping Center monument sign by a disgruntled ex-tenant, what do you do? “Let’s kick it up a notch” to quote that tired old not so cute famous TV chef Lagoosy or some such name? You live in Los Angeles and this happens to your New York property …$#@&. Well this just happened to me, not more than 20 minutes ago. In fact just as I was sitting down to write this article. I am upset, my blood is boiling, and I feel totally disgusted and a little helpless. If something like this hasn’t happened to you then you’ve never owned property. Thank God I have a Realtor locally who just called to let me know (sounds like some cheap ad if it weren’t the truth!). Writing this little piece was something I had planned on doing for a while. Talk about grist for the mill. These are the trials and tribulations of Absentee Ownership.

Here’s another one. Believe me this one is a doosie. He has a very famous name, in fact infamous. The family had a reality (yuck!!) show on TV. Well the show is no longer running because there wasn’t enough drama for the network to air. Well, the execs should have filmed at my shopping center.

Several months ago I receive a call about this tenants air-conditioning unit. He had just recently moved in, still in the honeymoon phase. He tells me his unit isn’t working. Though the unit was older, it was working just fine with the earlier tenant. We have a NNN lease but like a good landlord that I am I call my regular air-conditioning guy in NY. He’s no longer there. So here I go again looking for someone to do the work. I get a recommendation from one of the maintenance company I contracted last year. His man quotes me $12,500.00. This store is all of one thousand sq. ft. I almost fall over. He begins to explain to me that he can’t even test the unit because, “the wires are cut and since it’s old we might as well change it”. Oh and let’s not forget “the duct work”. What duct work? We already have ducts. To add insult to injury he tells me that he, of course, is not responsible for the electric work. So now, I also need to call and electrician. Red flags are popping up in my head.

Now let’s look at the subplot. I go back to the office and ask one of my colleagues at Stevenson Real Estate Services about this. He owns many properties and he does a lot of building. The man knows his construction and what things cost. He says, “For every 400 sq. ft. you need about 200 BTU’s, which according to the rule of thumb is about $1,500.00, the store being 1000 sq. ft. needs a 500 BTU unit. This should be around $4500-$5000 give or take a few $”. This gets me to thinking. The tenant has a tanning salon. He has built little rooms and they get really hot. He needs a very powerful unit and each room has to have duct work done. The normal air-conditioning unit is too small for his needs yet it’s the one that comes with the store as per our lease agreement. I am sure you can put two and two together. Hmm… I wonder who cut the lines and busted the unit. The thing is he almost got away with it. Talk about Absentee Ownership.

What is an absentee owner to do? Above I have listed only a couple of events which happened to me. I will be writing a series of articles on absentee ownership in my future Newsletters, which may be of help to my readers.

Filed under: Real Estate Stories