What did we talk about? Here’s the edited transcript below

Neighbors

Neighbors

Hello! For those of you who don’t know me my name is John Schink, and I am the founder and managing broker of Deerwood Realty here in St. Louis, Missouri.

I don’t know, over the years I’ve…I’ve seen a lot of things in real estate and I wanted to kind of bring them to you from my perspective, and just kind of learn from you, the community and just it’s a very bizarre time we have laws that that may or may not be followed, may or may not be prosecuted. We have traditions that that may or may not be reasonable. We have unwritten rules… but we’re all on this planet together and and some of the more fascinating things I I’ve run into in my real estate career is it’s just “what to do about the neighbors?”

So you know I don’t want to fight with my neighbor but if my neighbor has a boat outside and I’m trying to sell my house… the grass is three feet tall … my house is probably not gonna sell for as much money as it could just because of my neighbor. And while while it is your neighbor’s property and they should be able to do what they want to with it, I mean should they?

The same thing goes with HOA’s you know having a great HOA is a wonderful thing until they start getting a little nitpicky or the president you know turns into a Nazi and and all of a sudden now you’ve got all kinds of issues that you never had before and haven’t had for 50 years.

I enjoy things like landlord-tenant disputes… I was a property manager for a while, Not cut out for that and quite frankly just not cut out for for anything where you just have to be a jerk all the time it’s just not who I am.

So we’re going to go around and and do this the the podcast is going to be led by you. if you have a story about your neighbor, if you have a story about your landlord, if you have a story something that happened. Real Estate Agents are kind of fun i must every week get at least one or two stories from somebody that I’ve met about how their real estate agent was a jerk, or how they were incompetent or or just any number of things or they’ve dealt with and I and I kind of like to hear it it’s like listening to a train wreck.

Being in the real estate business i know how some things go. I know how I do things and I know where I’ve seen problems in the past; It’s really hard to teach somebody. I mean unless you do it a lot you’re going to have problems, and so we’ll talk about those things.

I have this phone number and if you call it just leave a voicemail about neighbors, HOA’s, tenant landlord disputes, real estate agents, and maybe we’ll talk about it on the show sometime it’s 314-274-3964. Call me leave a message and let’s go over some of these oddities.

Just to start off, I’ll tell you something that that I’m perplexed by in my own neighborhood, and I use a “neighbor” word… I don’t know where the guy lives I don’t know if he’s in my neighborhood, if he’s in my subdivision or what, but a couple years ago he used to walk and read a book at the same time and I don’t know if that’s what you want to do it’s fine no big deal but about six months ago we got to a new phase of strange. He well he dropped the book and what he does now is he walks, but then he sort of stumbles forward in a sort of jogging motion. Then he slows down and it looks like he’s dying. It looks like he’s having a medical issue every 500 feet or so. I don’t, I’ve never seen anything like that. I don’t know any books that teach stuttering while you’re running or attempting to run. I don’t know if that burns calories I don’t know what it is… it’s just weird, it’s strange and i don’t understand it.

That’s that’s the joy of living in a subdivision!

So, tell me your stories! Let’s go over stuff. I don’t know how to handle everything. I don’t know the rules anymore, Let’s just go about this we’re all on the same planet together and let’s figure this out. My goal would be one subscriber that’s not a family member. I think I’m at five if I could get one more that would be that would be good, but other than that let’s go to the first story.

I can normally post them on on the screen when I’m reading them but this one’s being a jerk and so I’ll just read it to you or the the parts of it. “Porterville family receives a racially charged letter from a neighbor” and so that’s a hell of a headline. I’ll put the link in the description, but let’s go through this. So Porterville, California “a family in Porterville is now speaking out after receiving a letter in the mail from alleged neighbors criticizing the race and claiming they’re making the neighborhood look cheap and dirty.”

As you go through it, they apparently started a food truck business during the pandemic and they put their trailer on the on their drive and they store the food truck on the driveway and then they got a letter in the mailbox on a Sunday. So we know that it wasn’t through the U.S Postal Service, and it they complain about a the dumpster outside the home and complain about it stinking so bad and being rotten with flies and maggots.

So these folks have started their own business and then they put a dumpster out in the front of their their house with a it’s a seafood business and then they’re in California and I suspect it’s pretty hot and miserable. So the article says the couple says they got the threatening letter in the Sunday mail, the letter complains about the family’s dumpster and food truck and threatens to have them ticketed and evicted. As a quote “your trailer stinks and it has maggots and flies it’s no wonder why the whole country looks down on Asians.” Now I don’t know if these people are Asian or not. I didn’t know there was a consensus that we looked down on Asians. I don’t. I don’t know anything about this.

i don’t know. It goes on to say, in quotes. “You’ve taken a nice clean neighborhood and made it look cheap and dirty and run down we will be talking to the owner about the property about having you removed and evicted from this neighborhood. Thanks for the rotten smell.”

Then it says, “it’s not from all your neighbors but most,” and so the couple, they’re obviously upset about this it says “we’re not the only ones in the neighborhood with dumpsters, there’s a few residents as well that have it and trailers as well it’s definitely clean we keep it clean and we keep it in our property you know i feel the problem isn’t about the trailer it’s more about racism.”

She just, quoted, “i just want to make sure you know i wasn’t in the wrong i didn’t want to get nothing towed or fine or nothing.” They were told by code enforcement that as long as it’s only being stored at the home and not operated for less than three days at a time it’s completely legal so their food trailer can be on the property as long as they’re, was it? What is it? Not operated for less than three days at a time it’s completely legal.

So i have questions, What would you do? I don’t have any, I don’t have any issues with people starting their own business; I work out in my own house okay? I think it’s stupid to have an office, I don’t have any, but i don’t have any clients come over or very rarely and it’s people that i know.

These people started a seafood business and they’ve got a trailer and now they’ve got apparently a dumpster in the front of the house, and we can only assume that it’s a bunch of seafood that’s left rotting.

So what do you do?

We can assume they’re renters because it says they were they were being threatened being evicted.

Is there a better way to have handled? The article doesn’t really say if the dumpster is allowed in the street. I mean dumpsters, gosh let’s talk about dumpsters for a second. If you’re doing a big construction project at your house, if you’re remodeling a bathroom, if you’re remodeling a kitchen … I mean, bringing in a dumpster makes a lot of sense, okay?

Storing seafood in your dumpster for weeks on end in hot weather in the front of your house? That’s probably gonna piss off the neighbors. It doesn’t seem like a good idea and so that’s kind of what I’m thinking. Is this okay? So now someone has a smelly dumpster in front of their yard and some neighbors walking by. Now the article says, “not all your neighbors but most.”

So who’s doing the polling is my question? I mean, did they all decide? Like, How do these things happen? Do we all just get around in a circle and say, “you know that dumpster stinks,” you know. “I know, I’ll write a racially charged letter!” It just seems, it just seems like a bad idea all around.

That’s why I’ve come to the internet, because i don’t… I don’t know what to do. If you go and you talk to the person, you say, “look, could you? could you move the dumpster?” You know, would that work? And would that have been better than writing an anonymous anonymous letter? I suspect so but but people are crazy these days.

Anyway that’s that’s my story for today like I said I’ll put the the link in the description below and then and let’s just go over that. I mean, “What would you do if your neighbor started a seafood business during the pandemic and now is putting their dumpster out in the in the front yard? I mean, I don’t condone racism of any kind. I don’t think that the world looks down on Asians. I think that was a little bit ridiculous! I don’t support anonymous letters to people’s houses and I just… I mean, unless you guys think it’s a good idea to write an anonymous letter to somebody the majority wins okay I guess? I just don’t understand why anybody thought it’d be a good idea to put a dumpster out in front of their yard with seafood, and then again I don’t understand why anybody thought it’d be a good idea to write an anonymous letter that says that your dumpster is terrible.

So that’s the first one! We’re starting our podcast on a smelly dumpster and Lord only knows where we’re gonna go from here, but thank you for listening, and thank you for watching. If you, like I said, if you could subscribe that’d be great but i understand, you know you can only have so many subscriptions and some of them have to be decent so do whatever you’d like and I’ll catch you on the next one, Thanks!

https://kmph.com/news/local/porterville-family-receives-racially-charged-letter-from-neighbor