Our May meeting marks the end of the Legislative sessions for the year with the governor signing bills and our activities also coincide. While you will continue to receive your newsletters through the summer we will not meet again until September when we plan on having our City Council candidates on hand.
Each July 1st all rental property owners must register with the City paying the $ 15.00 per unit fee for all rentals. Though all have to be registered there is a loophole in the Code that allows HUD rentals to avoid paying the fee. This may take a little effort but it can be done. Essentially you need to list your HUD rentals on the forms and the HUD contract numbers need referenced and then the fee gets marked "0". The Housing people may act confused but you should be able to get this through if you run into snags give Jeff Hutter a call.
Over the summer we will be adding various inserts for regular members regarding a host of issues including mold and lead paint just to mention a few.
We have also been asked by members if they can advertise properties they have for sale and we will start a new program for this with the June mailings. (Jeff Hutter will lead off) Members who have properties they want to sell or exchange will need to get approx 110 copies to Jeff Hutter prior to the 1st of a month to be included in the next months mailing which typically occurs within the first 5-10 days of the month. The paper size should be no bigger than a half page regular weight paper. Larger mailings may increase the postage and if this occurs we will ask for some help with the postage cost. Contact Jeff Hutter for more details.
There are more lead related courses available over the summer at Allegany College and you can check their website, which is linked from ours, or you can call them on the phone. These offerings center around the Inspection program and Supervisor courses.
The Landlord Courses taught by Jeff Hutter will be coming back in the fall at Allegany College. On October 20-21 the Landlord Survivors Course will be repeated. This two night course covers nearly all of the rules, regulations, common sense and other specialized knowledge necessary to make it as a Landlord. The reviews of this course were very good; however the one primary complaint was the lack of time to really dig into some of the regulations. With this in mind a second session will be held on November 10-11. This will be an in depth study of Landlord-Tenant Law, Lead Regulations and Housing Codes. These courses will be placed on the fall schedule probably in September. In the interim if you have question call Jeff Hutter.
We had a lively meeting in May with John Robb, local attorney, informing us about real estate ownership and a host of other things. A lot of questions were asked and I think everyone present learned something.
As part of the Governors Budget Bill we have increased fees for civil filings in District Court. This of course directly impacts Landlord -Tenant actions in court and the increases are as follows:
You may want to check with the Clerks at District Court for a complete schedule of fees as there were a number of other increases for small claims court and etc.
The Maryland Property Owners Network will meet in Annapolis on June 21, 2004 to review the activities of the Legislature during the 2004 session. During the summer we will report in detail what has occurred and what we can expect next year. We have been advised that most of the Bills that we wanted have been passed by the Legislature and signed into law by the Governor. These are as follows: HB 1245