Customer Reviews

Every Landlord's Legal Guide

5 star:		(65)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

CAVEAT for NY & CA landlords, February 12, 2005

Reviewer: AlexandriaPhilo "Cinelog" (Berkeley, CA United States) - See all my reviews

If you own in New York or California you will want to buy the editions specific for those states. I live in California and almost goofed and bought this edition.

More info is available at the Nolo site at nolo.com

This is the only book you need! It is incredibly easy to use and covers everything from rental agreements, to liability and discrimination, to maintenance, to evictions. It really leaves nothing out. The best part is the included CD-ROM which has all of the forms you'll need in an easy-to-fill-in format.
I own five properties and thanks to Every Landlord's Legal Guide I have learned how to legally protect myself and have consequently avoided countless expensive lawsuits. This book could end up saving you thousands!

If you only wanted to buy one book to help you get going in landlording, this is the one. It covers all the legal considerations you need to be aware of as a landlord including differences in state laws and the legal forms you need. In so doing, it covers most of the landlording issues that other books do since, really, most of them boil down to legal issues.

The state-by-state legal differences were particularly useful so I could craft my lease and properly follow the letter of the law. With just a generic how-to-landlord book, I'm not sure what I would have done. I probably wouldn't have been as aware as I should have about my local laws. And, bonus, the book is clear and easy to read.

I currently manage 16 of my own properties, I use this book weekly. It helps with a quick reference, just to make sure your not stepping over any legal boundaries, and it makes a great handbook for the more detailed and serious problems that seem to come hand in hand with Landlording. I recommend buying the version with the disc. The forms are in Microsoft Word format, and a little crude to edit, but I use them often and have built some of my standard forms from the ones they provide.

If you are planning to become a landlord, buy this essential book before you purchase a rental property or hang that "For Rent" sign in front of your house. A healthy dose of legal reality will counterbalance any easy money ideas you may have and help you decide whether the work and risk involved in being a landlord is how you would like to make money. The legal concepts you learn may even influence which properties you buy and how you maintain them.

If you are already a landlord, keep this book at your finger tips. The information is well organized and easy to find for quick reference. Legal concepts are presented in plain language and illustrated with scenarios showing how the concepts might play out in real life.

The authors make dry legal topics as interesting as possible. Add the urgency of knowing a legal misstep could land you on the wrong side of a lawsuit, and you will find yourself eagerly turning these pages!

This is the best landlord book! You have to get it. The CD ROM contains everything I use to manage my properties and be a good landlord. It makes property management and landlording so rewarding and easy than any person could succeed at it if they follow this book's guidelines.

I own 3 properties so far and this book has made my success possible!

This book gives you a good first overview, but you absolutely have to get a book on your state's regulations as well, especially if you live in a highly regulated state like Massachusetts. This book for example only gives you a vague idea on how to handle the security deposit, but Massachusetts state law is very specific and not following the rules precisely may cost you the deposit plus penalties.

the definitive legal guide. Accompanied with "Landlording, A Handymanual...etc" its all you need.

I found this title a worthwhile read.

The examples of various legal pitfalls were useful, particularly in the cases where they referred back to the sections in their own sample lease agreement that address the issue. Even if you decide to use some other lease, I found it a useful exercise to go through their very clearly written and easy to understand lease agreement. I think I will be much better prepared to evaluate, modify, or augment a lease for its applicability to my situation as a result.

While this book alone is not likely to be everything you might need for a particular state, the many state summaries sprinkled through the book help give the first time landlord an idea of some of the special cases to expect for their state. It also provides leads for finding more state specific details on your own and in some cases where states have more complex laws, references to other titles for those states.

I read this one after reading "The Complete Landlording HandBook" (Socrates Media) which covered much of the same ground. While both books provided competent coverage I give the nod to this book as the slightly better book for me, a first time landlord.

This book is incredibly thorough and it even points you to the relevant statutes in your state so you can look up the relevant laws. It is a great book. One thing to note is that all forms that you could want to edit are included on the CDROM as RTF files editable in any word processing program--a previous reviewer was wrong in saying that only PDF files were included on the CDROM.

This book has thorough and cogent discussions of all the major issues involved in being a landlord. There is much discussion of differences between various states in terms of laws--for example I learned that my state, Missouri, allows unconditional quit notices for even relatively minor violations of the lease, whereas most other states require cure or quit notices for more minor violations.

The book discusses which liability issues are most likely for landlords and which are most dangerous (in terms of potential losses). The book discusses dispute resolution with tenants and when to sue and when you absolutely need a lawyer. The money you spend on this book will save you a lot of trouble and a lot of money in lawyer bills because you will need your lawyer only rarely.