Real Estate For Atlanta Blog

On Sunday, April 26^th, 2009 you will have a chance to sample food from over 70 restaurants in the Marietta, GA area at the 16^th annual Taste Of Marietta event. In addition to fantastic food there will be live music, family fun and arts and crafts booths. This is a very popular event and tends to get crowded. Come early as parking is often limited. It is a great way to spend the day with the family or if you are new to the area you can check out what Marietta has to offer. Last year this even drew over 75,000 people. This year, the weather is supposed to be beautiful so I would expect it to draw even more. Some new events this year include a cooking demonstration stag. Admission is FREE and parking is FREE. The restaurant booths will charge a nominal fee for samples of their food (.50 – 5.00 each). The event is taking place right in the historic Marietta Square area. You can find out more details by visiting www.TasteOfMarietta.com. I hope to see you there.

In the good old days, a tenant could be pretty sure that if they continued to pay their rent on time and took good care of the property that they’d have the right to continue living in the property for the duration of their lease and then receive a refund for their security deposit upon vacating the property at the end of the lease. The current market has introduced a new potential complication that every renter needs to know about and take the necessary steps to protect their interests. What is happening too often now is that landlords are collecting rent checks from their tenants; but not paying their mortgages. When this happens, the bank will foreclose on the landlord’s rental property; potentially leaving the unsuspecting tenant who has been paying their rent as they are supposed to out in the cold, literally. So what can be done to prevent this from happening to you? For starters, before you sign a lease with a landlord, it’s a good idea to ask the right questions to make sure that the landlord is current on their payments and is likely to have the capacity to continue to do so. I have seen some tenants go as far as insisting that they make their payments directly to the owner’s lending institution; but good like finding a property owner who’d be willing to agree to that. At the very least, research can be done to investigate how much the property owner owes on the home. If you are renting a home in which the landlord has a significant amount of equity in the property then this would be much less likely to become a problem. However, if you are renting a home from a landlord that owes 100% or more of what the property is worth, you might want to proceed with caution. Additionally, you will be protected better if your deposit is being held in a designated trust account by a property manager / broker rather than being intermingled with the landlord’s funds. Licensed agents and brokers are required to do so; but if you are renting a by owner property from a landlord who is not a licensed real estate broker or agent, you might not be as protected. So before you sign that lease, be sure to evaluate the situation in the light of the current market or better yet, utilize a good real estate professional to help protect your interests.

Believe it or not, there is a law in the state of Georgia that prohibits real estate agents from advertising exact square footage for a property. There is no field for this in any of our MLS systems. I’m not really sure where this law originated and I personally think it’s counter-productive since square footage is so important to determining home value. Nonetheless, that’s the rule and all agents are required to follow it.

The good news is that even though the square footage information is not in the mls system, it is recorded in the public tax records. Therefore, home shoppers and agents can still obtain the information from an external source. The problem is that the data in the recorded tax records is often incorrect; particularly if there have been improvements to the property that were not reported to the county. Once you get experience looking at a lot of homes, you’ll be able to know if the tax record square footage is at least in the right ballpark. The best way to know for sure is to go into the home and measure it.