Evicting Heirs and Tenants from Estate Property, with Daniel Bornstein

0:00 Gross this is Probate Weekly where we get together every week and talk about things probate real estate related whether you're investor or a wholesaler a real estate agent an attorney a vendor in the field we get together and talk about how we can all help our customers and ourselves be more successful by making more money and by increasing wealth of ourselves and our clients through real estate and see here I see our guest and you see if I get him unmuted I'll add them to Spotlight and so we often have guests to interview to be educational to network to learn about things just a quick housekeep before we get launched there we're now going to kind of be a little stricter on the sign up process and the reminders are going to kind of encourage you to go to the YouTube unless you want to participate love to have you participate love to have your cameras on love to have you chat and ask questions raise your hand ask questions live we have we have a real live attorney here who would charge a lot of money for his advice a chance to get some free questions in but you need to come into the zoom to do that otherwise if you just want to watch we're going to kind of encourage you to come to the YouTube where we live stream it as well as record it in the past episodes or there as well and if you want to be reminded when that launches you're welcome to go to the YouTube And subscribe and then you'll know if you hit the notification button you'll get an email reminder within YouTube if that's a more convenient way for you to come into the to get this material but this is meant to be participative I'm a practitioner I'm at selling coaching I met selling data I'm here sewing representing families working with attorneys Selling Houses helping investors buy property and I do this every day this is what I do for business and so along the way I realize I need to network with other practitioners as well as learn how to be better what I do and then learn how to be better at serving the vendors that we work with or the attorneys or the families we work with So today we're excited to have a guy who I've seen saw him on YouTube and then had a chance to talk from individually one-on-one just incredible resource an attorney who specializes in

2:04 Evictions based in Northern California and San Francisco attorney Daniel Bornstein and Daniel thanks so much for joining us today it's my pleasure thanks for the invitation I'm excited to be here so just hold back so we get to know who you are where did you grow up and then what prompted you to get into the field of law so I grew up in Cleveland Ohio and after graduating from high school went up to University of Michigan as an undergrad and at that point in time I realized that there was a deep desire to help people resolve disputes and do so in an effective Manner and I got lucky and got out to Northern California and went to Berkeley and started my legal career as a student at the law school and thereafter landlord tenant law was an available area of law that a young attorney who wanted to be entrepreneurial could immediately develop client relationships and as a result of that over the course of approximately 28 years I've built a nice practice helping people to resolve their landlord tenant disputes so let's give a little context to what your practice looks like do you represent tenants only do you represent landlords only or both 98 is representing owners investors mom and pop Property Owners brokerages real estate agents and resolving their disputes whether it's residential or commercial and is your business strictly tenant landlord relations or you get into the wider areas of real estate law as well interestingly I'm also a real estate broker I have a brokerage and a property management business and as a result of being in landlord tenant law I'm also a real estate investor and so at times I'm tasked with representing people in the defense of Buy sell agreement failure disclose but primarily my focus on a day-to-day basis is representing people and resolving their landlord tenant disputes

4:08 Now it seems to me now just kind of full disclosure most my market has been California though we've made this a national phone call we've had attorneys and real estate agents investors from across the country More Southern California because that's where I'm from initially and that's where the following came from but I saw you and I know that San Francisco is different laws in the county and city but when the state of California and I seems to me to be pretty similar to Los Angeles don't expect you to know all the details of La law but is your assessment that San Francisco is somewhat similar to the city of Los Angeles as far as landlord laws and things like that yeah so there are in some respects two overarching jurisdictional issues does your local jurisdiction have a state I'm sorry have a local rent control just cause eviction ordinance and many of course Santa Monica has What some would consider to be very restrictive and if your local jurisdiction does not have a local ordinance then you self-select into the state ordinance that recently came into effect so really I would need to know which jurisdiction we're talking about and then I could tell you what rules and regulations structure relationship between a landlord and a tenant and interestingly when I first started out in the Bay Area we had Berkeley we had San Francisco and then we had Oakland three now there's 15 different local ordinances that you need to be aware of so we have become very balkanized in our landlord-tenant relationships and each one has a little bit of a nuance and if it doesn't fall within that then we're faced with the state recently enacted Lo just cause eviction State rent Control Ordinance that came into effect approximately December 2020.

6:02 Well it sounds like it's good for business every new law feeds more and more attorneys and that is the unfortunate aspect of a industry that is highly regulated such as real estate so when you look at this are you what percentage of your time is as a attorney representing a client what percentage of your time is spent on your own practice and you know your own Investments your own real estate brokerage 95 of my work is representing clients in the legal field my property management company is well I'm the broker of record I have a core group of experts who handle that and then they also oversee the real estate Investments I have as well got it so what's the most common case or you know case scenario that you deal with as attorney in an eviction case an eviction I'm mostly non-payment around that would be the first one that would come to mind that every month there's a deluge of opportunities for me people to fail in their obligation which is the timely payment of rent and so that's where we get that rhythmic new client at the beginning of the month because by the 10th of the month they're starting to get concerned about why someone hasn't paid the rent it's become particularly cumbersome complex confusing for the lay real estate investor as we involve covid and some of the COVID prohibitions some of the covid moratoriums but the bulk of my work is non-payment rent nuisance Behavior illegal use of the premises owners who want to recover possession of the unit for their own use breach of lease agreements and what have you and that may also include drafting lease agreements enforcing lease agreements negotiating terms of lease agreements it really is a rich and complicated practice but much of it involves similar actions on a monthly basis

8:05 So obviously we're aware that we're in different times we were a couple years ago Statewide cities and Counties have ordinances regarding covid what's the process today for non-payment of rent let's say the city of San Francisco is there a process to evict for non-payment brand or is it still restricted in unavailable San Francisco opened up and you are entitled to demand rent that hasn't been paid in San Francisco though despite the state moratorium ending on covid San Francisco imposed its own moratorium and thus if you pursue a non-payment rent case and attendant asserts that their ferry to pay the rent was predicated upon a covid financial impact that would be a defense to the unlawful detainer action and so we're still dealing with the repercussions of covid yet we are entitled to pursue those unpaid rent claims but we're not sure how the case is going to resolve until we get into the case to determine if the defendant has a legitimate basis to claim that they did not pay the rent due to a COVID impact and if they can prove that was because of the COVID impact then they're pretty much just impossible to get them out of the property isn't it would be a defense and yet we still recommend being aggressive and the reason being is sitting and doing nothing only enlarges the dispute and 98 of all cases settle through resolution and even if a tenant has a COVID related impact that doesn't prohibit you from negotiating a voluntary move out doesn't prohibit you from reaching a resolution regarding the prior debt yet you are in some respects compromised by virtue of the defense that's available interestingly in Alameda County we still have an eviction moratorium so you're not allowed to demand unpaid rent and so you cannot go to the court and seek the removal of a tenant

10:11 Through an eviction LA County as I'm sure many of you know has struggled with its own local eviction moratorium and there's been a movement to end the moratorium towards the end of this year and that you know is something that Alameda County is the last of the counties in California that has an existing moratorium that's been challenged in court but the court has not rendered a ruling recently as of last week Governor Newsom indicated that the COVID emergency he intends to end within the next few months which will be helpful My Hope Is that the community continues to be healthy and get healthier and that the terrible impact this pandemic has had on all of us is something that we look in the rear view mirror and treat as a historical anomaly but we are still dealing with the repercussions of it in the court system well I made a prediction I'll just say it again publicly for what it's worth that I don't believe in LA county even when the state we're trying to ends I don't they kick the can down to the end of the year the idea it was kind of phrase like well they'll it'll be over then but my prediction is that they'll continue it and if they don't continue it politically they'll make it impossible for judges to hear those cases physically they'll shut the courts down and I think it's going to be very difficult to get that restarted I just don't see that yeah all I can tell you is housing is very politicized and landlord tenant law is especially political because you're dealing with people's housing and as a result of that different interest groups have a different approach to public policy relating to it could be very frustrating for someone who is sitting with you know tens of thousands of dollars of unpaid rent debt and I've had people ask me well what should I do in their properties in Alameda County and I my flip and dancers pray and the reason being is that I don't have the array of choices because I'm

12:15 Hamstrung by a moratorium that if you demand the rent you are in fact subjecting yourself to potential criminal prosecution yeah so the this particular live stream though regular evictions is a part of my business as a broker as well even in Probate we have properties where the state inherits a property has a tenant and that's a more standard eviction but there's a unique aspect to probate where we often have an heir who without ever having a contract some sort of a verbal agreement was there maybe before the decedent passed maybe moved in after the decedent passed and there's different circumstances the laws affect those people then a tenant with an actual contract can you kind of give us a little overview of sure what options are available for an estate that has a person who happens to be an heir whether before or after the decedent passed I handle these type of situations quite frequently and I work closely with trust and Estates attorneys who have a niche in understanding trust in the state's law but when you start to migrate into landlord-tenant law and unlawful detainer actions they simply are hamstrung and similarly I won't get involved in a probate matter because I don't have that core expertise what I do have the expertise is in asking pointed questions to a trustee or to a trust in a state's attorney is who is this person inside the unit is there a landlord-tenant relationship if there are beneficiary were they given the right to occupy the premises simply because of their familial status and they don't pay rent and if they don't pay rent and they don't have a landlord-tenant relationship they're not a tenant and if they're not a tenant they're not entitled to the accrued benefits of many of the laws that structure landlord-tenant relationships including local just cause eviction ordinances local rent regulation ordinances and it makes it very different of a removal process

14:20 And the simple analogy is if I give you permission to live in a unit without the expectation of compensation simply because you're a family member the a law allows me to rescind that permission so that person is a licensee someone who has given permission to occupy and you can rescind permission and if you rescind permission by a Written Letter notifying the beneficiary of the estate that you're no longer entitled to be or we've made the decision and you need to leave if they don't leave after receiving that letter then you have perfected your right to file what we call a forcible detainer action and that is similar to a unlawful detainer action the results are the same but you're not under the statutory rubric of a landlord-tenant relationship which makes it easier to remove are those detainers limited by COVID restrictions as well Statewide and interesting no they weren't because there wasn't a tenant in that right in that unit it was merely someone who had permission to be there right but what you need to recognize is every County court operates a little bit differently every County court has a different culture and if they see something that looks like an eviction action they may slow it down because they're trying to be cautious and then I have to explain to them hey this is not a landlord-tenant relationship this is someone who is occupying a unit who doesn't have the protections of the ordinance and a lot of probate attorneys and trust and Estates attorneys really aren't able to delineate the process and it really is a fork in the road because you can have a beneficiary who also is a tenant because they have a police agreement and are paying rent correct in that situation they do have actions correct if they were merely in the unit because hey mother gave them a space to live because they never got their life together when mother passes away you're certainly

16:22 Entitled as the trustee of that estate the successor trustee to say look the remaining beneficiaries are looking to sell the asset we need you out in order to maximize value of the sale and if you remain in there we will seek legal intervention and more importantly if you're a beneficiary why would you sabotage the benefit of maximizing value out of the estate which you're going to participate in by staying in the unit and oftentimes with a little assistance of myself or another attorney the beneficiary gets sober and arranges a Time transition from the property however where there are family members that they have a historic residue of discomfort with each other distrust that's a great word historic residue by the way yeah I'm going to use that phrase I say that because there's a lot of that interest in the state's work if you've got a beneficiary who's upset because they're not receiving the full what they fully expected and they're camping out in a unit they may sabotage other beneficiaries by wanting to cleave to the unit and make it difficult out of spite and it is regardless of whether it's in their best interest to camp in there and that's when I get involved I get involved and I send them the bad news which is your time there has to come to an end and if you don't vacate then I'm going to have to file the lawsuit if I file the lawsuit typically 90 days later we've got a resolution with the voluntary move out of the premises well and the bad news for the beneficiary is they get charged all those legal costs on their portion of the they're thinking I only have one-fifth of the house what difference do it matter the answer is no all that cost the executor you know they're smart can allocate all those costs to that beneficiary and to probably judges my experience will prove that so yeah absolutely so where someone ends up impacting the estate and depleting the assets of the state it will come out

18:27 Of their portion yeah should I ask a question I think you just covered it so let me just summarize a quick disclaimer though you are an attorney who's not giving us legal advice he's more educating us as to the law and general procedures and practices Shaw asked does a power of attorney have the right to evict the sister living with Mom or of course private attorney right away it's a whole different situation and change the locks and threaten to change the trespassing for the daughter to come and get her stuff so I guess it depends on who owns the house and what you need over my face very good question you know if the daughters lived there for real many years I'm not in favor of just changing locks because it could be deemed a unlawful lockout and that's a violation of California law however there are times where you know someone comes into a unit and they didn't have permission to be there they're a trespasser the problem that exists in California is that police officers are often educated about landlord-tenant matters a little bit and whenever they have a situation where we're dealing with housing they won't remove the trespasser they'll say it's a civil matter and we'll leave the person in there and then the client calls me up and says I can't get this person out I call the port police the squatter said they have tenancy and the police won't do anything about it and so then you're stuck with having to proceed with the Civil matter or alternatively be super aggressive and lack of personality if the person doesn't have a tendency and they were merely there for a couple hours a couple days of course you can forcibly remove them but you got to be careful about it because you don't want to enlarge risks for yourself right my suggestion is when you're contemplating such a move contact an attorney and the attorney will evaluate it the one thing I will say is this anybody who has been a sophisticated consumer of legal assistants will realize if you talk to two attorneys you may get three different opinions and really it depends upon the type of

20:29 Attorney that practices whether they're aggressive whether they're very conservative there are some attorneys who are so scared of their Shadow they will do nothing and end up costing more money and taking more time to get something done that's rather apparent which is look if someone's in your property and they don't have a tenancy you don't have to go through a formal 90-day eviction process you can tell them to get out and actually change the locks on them but Case by case and basis yeah you know the thing about Mike's practices people say well aren't you sympathetic to the daughter living there and I'd say well I'm also synthetic to the Widow who can't sell the house to pay for medical bills and she's living a horrible life impoverished even though her husband who is a war hero left her this house because some squatter moved in on the property so sometimes you can be sympathetic to the wrong person and not all right there's what I call competing narratives and there's competing goals if you hire me then I'm to zealously represent you I am absolutely empathetic to the complexity of life and the fact that certain things result in bad news for people and having to make chapter changes in their life but in the end I'm only responsible for the person who has hired me and my job is to ethically complete the goals that they have set for myself and you know it is tricky and it's particularly sticky when you're dealing with family members in a trust and estate situation or where you have you know ill will arising out of Decades of perceived slights and I cut to the chase I can't get emotionally invested in other people's trauma I have to actually give people what they have hired me to do and as a professional that's my orientation and that's how I sleep well at night because it is not atypical we're at times you can be retained as you get into a dispute you start to be empathetic with

22:33 The other side and find your client to be especially aggressive and the only thing you can do is either self-select out of that relationship or continue to work in an ethical manner to accomplish your clients goals for every on the call here from the zoom call love to have you participate raise your hand the zoom put a question of the chat we've had some really good questions here from Sean we have another one here Tdap but the ratio we're also welcome to participate if you're watching on the YouTube we live stream it there but if you put the comments there they'll pop up as well and I'll have a chance to ask Daniel live so does executive have an obligation to the to inform the beneficiaries of the probate data and assets so that's a perfect question which I'm not sure how familiar you are with trust as far as it is an Executor question of probate it's all public so I think you're asking about trustee and a trust Administration situation because executor of course all the beneficiaries are going to get noticed by law of all the key points are you familiar with a state Administration do you trust the state law and obligations as far as notifications and such no and as I mentioned if I were ever to be asked to appoint a trust in a States matter I'll defer to the expertise of the trust in the state's attorney what I am is sort of the hired third party who handles the landlord tenant disputes or the beneficiary disputes regarding the presence of a beneficiary in a unit I will say is as far as a Shameless plug the last on last week's episode of Probate Weekly we did have a trust estate attorney specialist we asked that exact specific question so if you go to episodes that Probate Weekly.com you'll see the par episodes and last week's episode we went through those really that whole discussion of required notice and if there's a trust and copies of the trust and all that went through that in detail last week so but the beauty of Daniel and I

24:36 Think you know what I want to point out to the real estate agents because in some ways our business is similar in terms of our license allows us to do a lot of things you know as a Realtor® I can sell to for some home buyers I can do invest in property I can sell commercial industrial my license allows a huge variety of product and situations in my case I pick one very narrow niche of probate and Daniel sharing with us as an attorney he has the license to practice all kinds of law but you can just see how quick he is to I want to say a void but you know stay within the lines of where his expertise is because if you want to get the great information on evictions you go to him and if you know if you're going to ask a question outside that line he's going to refer you to a great attorney and trust or probate or the other matter that's related and I think there's some great business advice for all of us to watch and that so just come taking off the attorney hat maybe putting on the entrepreneur hat or the business person hat what is it that keeps you kind of in those lanes are you know repealing our conversation in progress previously and what I admire about you is your focus I think that's your strength as an as a practitioner what is that helps you stand those lines because there's always Temptation well gee that's an extra case it's an extra check it's extra money how do you keep in those lines or what does that keep you there once you develop a confidence in a particular set of rules and regulations you are so much more effective than anybody else that there's no reason for you to be venturing away I have so much business in this one Niche that it doesn't make sense for me to venture and once you develop a confidence in your professional Integrity you don't want to relearn an area of law and the interesting thing is that you really if you're selecting an attorney and you happy particular issue you really want to ask them are you doing this type of work repeatedly or is this new to you and out of deference to that client if

26:40 It's new to you should be referring him or her to someone who's doing it all the time because what we want this to be is Administrative processing of paperwork as opposed to you going back into the library and learning how to do it because a lot of my clients who come to me they got in trouble because they relied upon their cousin in Stockton California practices personal injury law and he decided to help his uncle out on a landlord-tenant matter in San Francisco not knowing that you can't use the forms that are available on the California apartment association website because the forms are local specific so when you are choosing an attorney you really want to ask that tough question of do you do this all the time and law has become so Niche specific that there are types of unlawful detainer eviction actions that I will not do because there are other attorneys who are doing it all the time and out of respect for the client who I want to have Excellence I want him to go to someone who's excellent because if you're having to redo it because of a mistake one it creates professional liability and two it's not a way to function as a professional you want to give excellent advice and if you don't have it you want to connect that person to someone who can provide excellent advice and there is no shame in finally recognizing that you're not going to know everything and I often tell people look in San Francisco I'm feeding a family off of about 10 pages of the municipal code that if you told me when I started law school that I would become well-versed in 10 pages and that's going to continue to feed my family for you know 20 years I would have been shocked but I would have thought I would have had a wider array and the reality is that once you learn the nuances of a very technical area which is landlord tenant law you really can continue to do it and the size of your client base just

28:46 Continues to enlarge because landlord-tenant law people in real estate they're going to have a landlord-tenant dispute at some point in their career because it's endemic it's a very complicated area and you have the overlay of local law state law COVID moratorium revisions the covid moratorium and the interrelationship between it and it is very complex plus changing politics I mean that it's an area that's not even the law right but you have to negotiate your way through the reality of their people who have a political position that may or may not be in accordance with the law right I was on the news yesterday Oakland is again charging it was a excuse me excuse me you run the news again yesterday it turns out yeah I was on the news I was being interviewed at on a 6 p.m News Channel because Oakland is introducing a new law that's going to be voted upon to enlarge the real estate multi-unit properties that will be subject to just cause eviction rules and I had contemplated that will likely result in more people deciding not to rent those units because they don't want to be put into a position where they're subject to an ordinance because once you have just cause evictions a fixed term lease does not really mean you recover the unit it means that the tenant is entitled to be there as long as they're not subject to a term just cause what immediately came after my dialogue was a legal attorney from a non-profit organization who argued that look that sounds like Mr Bornstein doesn't want to analogously have hourly fee obligations with minimum wage on employment and the analogy was totally off but what was clear was the politics behind it which was suggesting that the landlord-tenant relationship

30:49 Without just causing eviction rules has no laws and in fact it has an abundance of laws right it's just that we don't need to have laws that are in some respects overriding the contracts that people actually enter into one of the proposed laws I'm sure you're aware of in San Francisco is about properties that are vacant yeah so it must affect you as either an investor or as a broker if not as an attorney what is that gonna is that going to pass do you think and what effect is that kind of in the market well being taxed for making a decision not to rent typically when you own a piece of property or you own a car or you own something you have the right to use it you also have the right not to use it because you own it and you can do with it what you believe is your right within reason as long as it's not volatile the law because of the housing crisis an owner's decision not to rent and keep it vacant engenders the risk of being taxed in Oakland they have a vacancy tax and in San Francisco that's contemplated we have a housing crisis it makes the politics of landlord-tenant law that much more problematic but the easy solution is something that takes a lot of courage and that's build and build and build and build more housing and that is something that California has had difficulties with because of a number of problems I don't get involved typically in the public policy debates because I'm so busy with just the Practical responsibility of managing the disputes I've been hired to manage but I am aware of it and you know one of the ironies is whereas the perception of someone who is handling landlord-tenant law as a landlord attorney is that I'm you know aggressive and not attractive because I'm involved in evictions the reality is that many people come to me in a community where there's a tenant who's

32:52 Disturbing the other tenants and the Tenant is a nuisance and what I'm doing by removing someone from the property is actually stabilizing the other tenancies in empowering the community be healthy because there's nothing worse than having to pay rent in a community where other people are so disturbing because of their dysfunction that they're impacting your ability to actually have a happy life in that building so I pride myself on helping stabilize buildings by making sure that other tenants who are great tenants are able to function effectively on a day-to-day basis by getting rid of people who simply are not able to participate healthy in that community one of the things that impressed me about you when I did my research and then when we spoke personally was that you seem to be focused or Point towards or strategize towards a resolution other than going through the courts meaning that a larger number of cases you handle seem to end up being resolved by both parties rather than the paperwork milled eviction fighting it and all that talk a little bit about that if I'm a client concerned hiring though you can't promise that there's no way to know if the other part is ever going to be reasonable I'm only hiring you because I assume they're unreasonable so how do you counsel clients of what to expect or what's a reasonable outcome to plan right very good point I am looking at the dispute from a business perspective the real estate may be worth three quarters of the million dollars two and a half million dollars the unpaid rent debt is sixteen thousand dollars but having the person transition out will increase the value of the real estate so I'm looking at dispute resolution from an economic standpoint I take the Hippocratic Oath like a doctor of Do no harm and I believe that you paying me for or a dispute and paying me too much to resolve the dispute is economic harm so I always tell my client the whole goal is to recover possession of the premises as fast and as cheap as possible taking into account attorney fees time and risk and that means that when I'm giving you advice you can

34:55 Always say to me why do you recommend that we waive two months rent and provide the person five thousand dollars to vacate and the answer will be because it's going to take three months to get to court it may cost you five thousand dollars and you still have a housing problem because you have a leak in your unit so you're better off paying the person accomplishing recovery or possession as fast and as cheap as possible and this based upon my evaluation the facts is the best course of conduct and I will tell you there are two types of attorneys one type of attorney likes disputes gets jazzed about it gets their juices flowing by being involved in a dispute and it can be really harmful because they don't mind bringing you into the dispute and enlarging it there's other attorneys who don't like disputes who like the resolution for me I like the pleasant result of getting closure getting compromised accomplishing the goal and having the client move on having accomplished the goal of recovery or possession of the unit I don't like disputes I don't have the attention span for an 18-month dispute and the beauty of landlord tenant law it's usually a 90-day event so it's fast chess instead of you know four hour chess it's a five minute chess game and you do it repeatedly and that's what I like and you will find that I'm not the attorney who's going to write an appellate brief and the attorneys are going to get down into the dispute have a communication with the other side see if there's a possibility resolution and get to that resolution as quickly as possible now I'm doing buyouts all the time so if in an example of a beneficiary who's camping in a unit if it's going to cost fifteen thousand dollars to go through the forcible detainer court process but the beneficiary says I'll leave in 30 days if you give me five thousand dollars I'm going to recommend that immediately oh yeah even though the trustee a sister who has a terrible relationship with the malingering person who's inside the unit cannot stand the idea that this person gets paid for

36:59 Being obstinate and they say hey I'd rather pay you than pay this person I have to immediately say I'd rather pay this person to accomplish the goal so you can move on because I've got enough money and I don't need more money I want to resolve your dispute expeditiously and I promise you the only recommendation I'm gonna give you is if I were standing in your shoes what I would do and that's what I do as a practitioner I again I assumed that San Francisco and LA are fairly similar in terms of markets pricing legal situations maybe says there's a little more Cutting Edge than LA but we're right behind in most laws and such I commonly come across cases where we have offered on buyouts 30 40 and 50 000 where the by not by selling up with that tenant in there refusing that buyout the seller is going to get less by about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars or a hundred thousand dollars less so they're going to lose money and write it off and if they leave the person in we offer 30 40 up to 50 I've seen in certain I can think one case in particular and I walk away saying myself somebody bad's gonna buy this property to get them out it's not going to cost them fifty thousand dollars they're going to pay somebody 500 bucks and have them removed is the number the bio like is a common buyout in your Market five thousand dollars or for giving back ran or I used that five dollars and dollar figure gently because I didn't want to cause people's hair to go up in the back of their neck but the average buyout in San Francisco is forty three thousand forty four thousand there you go there you go all right so 43 000. So that happens regularly it's not that's not a that's not I just made that number up that's it the reality is what I am involved in is arbitraging vacancies that there is a value in real estate on vacancies yes because of rent control yes every unit an easy math figure is if you could get an extra thousand dollars of rent on a unit increases the value of the

39:01 Building a hundred thousand dollars so if a tenant is two thousand dollars below market and you offer them fifty thousand to vacate your client is likely to appreciate the property a hundred and fifty thousand right paying fifty right I do that all the time and that's why I call my myself a business attorney I'm helping people make educated decisions about their real estate investment they have a dispute and you know I'm doing buyouts in excess of six figures or as low as a rent waiver and people ask me well how do you what's the market value there's not enough data for me to say one range I can tell you what the rent board comes out with I can tell you that tenant attorneys try to get as much money and landlord attorneys are trying to give as little and the tenant attorney is trying to capture all of the upside of the vacancy and the landlord attorney is trying to pay what the relocation payment would be plus a little bit of a upside and therein lies the rub but I mean San Francisco Los Angeles Oakland Berkeley Santa Monica they have buyouts in New York City there's been buyouts in excess of million dollars so it is really about that there are occupancy values because it allows you to freely use your property and there is inherently upside on selling a property vacant and selling a property tenant occupied especially if the rent is below market and that's what I'm primarily asked to do and as an attorney I'm not looking to win a dispute it's not a baseball or basketball game I'm asked to accomplish a goal as expeditiously as possible and make good business decisions economic decisions on behalf of a client and when you live in that realm then you can really sleep easy because you're not enlarging a dispute for the sake of your billables when you get so busy you're not interested in more work you're interested in resolving your case expeditiously so you can move on to the other case that's waiting for you right yeah no I've seen those

41:05 Numbers I see all the time and I've not had the customers who are willing to write that check unfortunately and I guess it just depends on your market and who you deal with and also probably the reason why I wanted to talk to you is to get this on video so I can send this to my next customer and say it's not me saying this is the market and this is the number in but it's a business decision at the end of the day it's a business you don't have to like it's just the way it is yeah and you know people can protest but in the end you're still tasked with making good decisions yeah with the information that's presented to you and here's the a simple solution someone asked I'll leave for US 20 000 in 60 days or you can try to remove me through the court well the Court's stuff with COVID related backlog you still have to pay an attorney it's going to cost you 15 000 for an attorney to go through a full-on landlord-tenant dispute that lasts four to six months so twenty thousand will look really good in retrospect right and you know I'm comfortable Looking Over the Horizon of a dispute and giving advice clients will accept it or want to go through the path and only in hindsight will we know if the decision was correct or not and with an attorney and landlord tenant law every day is an opportunity to do outstanding work and every day is an opportunity to think well maybe I would have chosen a different path and you only know in retrospect whether the choices you made were prudent the important thing is at the time of making the decision you are evaluating all the variables and then making an educated guess about which path you think is going to be more prudent and when you get experienced after 28 years you tend to make those good decisions and what happens is I have clients who sometimes say Mr Borstein you were brilliant in the back of my mind I'm thinking you were lucky on this one and then sometimes I have clients who say I'm disappointed about why this took so long and how why it cost so much and I'm thinking the back of my mind you don't know how hard we worked and another attorney who looked at the work I did

43:07 Would say that was a phenomenal effort Mr Morrison you did top-notch work so you know I often have dialogues with myself about it and you know just as a side for people to understand when I was an undergrad I wanted to help people and I was contemplating going into psychology and the being a psychologist and therapist and what I found as a landlord attorney people come to me with a thorn embedded in their head and the thorn is they've got a landlord-tenant dispute that every day they have to interact with it or they have a beneficiary that's causing them grief because they're in the unit the family member passed away and they want to do right by the family member and they cannot do right because of this dispute as an attorney and landlord tenant law when I do good work and accomplish the goal of getting that person out or a recovering possession I know that thorn in the client's head has been taken out they move on they're happy to pay me they the psychic problem that existed has been resolved and I feel a sense of accomplishment because it is psychic trauma that gets dealt with and I realize now after practicing law 28 years that is a therapist I could be spending 20 years with a person in therapy and never know if I got to the root cause as an attorney it's a practical way to resolve psychic distress well you know in this topic again when we spoke previously one of the things that struck me and I think it's true for me too is your expertise in the law allows you to take that part of the dispute off the table so then you can pay attention to the communication and try to help your customer understand this is emotional mistake you're making because these are the legal implications and if they trust your legal judgment then they can maybe address their emotional issue if they if they are too emotional to respect you they're not going to listen to you because you're what the hell do you know but in your case you are perceived as an expert in

45:10 This field so that's off the table it forces me as the client to say he might be right maybe I'm being too emotional about this and I think that's a big part of my business also is trying to tell customers these are your options I wish you had that other option but you don't so here's what we can do for you sure how much your business is really the soft skills of just communicating with your clients agreed and I often tell real estate agents and other people we're in the same business we're managing relationships we set goals for ourselves set goals for the client and hopefully accomplish it and we have to work together some relationships are difficult to manage because you're speaking apples and they're hearing oranges but the goal as an effective professional is to manage that relationship ship as successfully as possible and that's what I hope to do my experiences being forthright blunt clear is the best solution and people have to understand that I'm not there to in some respects coddle you in your anxiety I'm there because you've told me you want to accomplish this goal and I laser focus on it and that I always have kleenex in my room but I give you time to sort of emote but then I get right back to how are we going to make decisions about this and since you are the principal and I'm a fiduciary of yours you're directing me and I give you advice and I hope in the end that the advice is taken and my expertise is usually that people follow the advice how often do you advise a client their actions versus giving them Clarity and having them make the decision I give them the options I ask them which option to take if I disagree with the option and I say I think your drug you know walking up a steep hill that doesn't make sense I'd ask them to reconsider it and you know if I'm absolutely opposed to it I'll always

47:12 Tell them to get a second opinion and I actually like giving people second opinions and giving them the option of speaking to someone else because as I said at the earliest you can talk to two attorneys get three opinions but when I give someone the option of speaking to someone and their second opinion is consistent with mine then I feel like I've triangulated judgment and landlord tenant law I and I say this about legal work it's not like buying a TV right or it's not a math problem where there's a correct answer there's moving targets and it's a bit of an art it's a bit of knowledge it's a bit of social engineering and what you want is an attorney who's Adept at it and there are different types of attorneys and you need to find an attorney that works well with you landlord tenant law you really do need an attorney who is a good presence can manage Communications effectively and is efficient with their time that's not an appellate attorney right a pellet attorney will go in the back of a library May drool out of both sides of their mouth and you know eight hours later they've got a beautiful written brief that works real well that's not me right so when you're evaluating your attorney you have to know what is the task I'm evaluating them with because if I know that this is a 90-day Affair and we're really trying to get a resolution to the matter get a written agreement and ensure that the person will vacate and you've got a good agreement that's someone who is a little bit more efficient with email drafting typical simple documents and making sure they show up to court and are prepared for the case so as an attorney your license in California only or other states as well licensed in California and from and there are some firms that will have offices throughout the state my offices are in Oakland and San Francisco I radiate out of that area and do go up as far as Sacramento for some work Santa Cruz for some work

49:15 And that's really the circumference I do give Consulting in Los Angeles and other places the one impediment is that landlord tenant matters do require Court appearances whether it's a settlement conference or a court trial or a jury trial or pre-trial motions and it just is not efficient for a boutique office to be running down to Southern California by plane to show up at a court hearing and prediction here drink COVID during COVID coin the court post covid restrictions is appearances in court in eviction Court required in person or they allow video they did it they did allow videos and I think some of the interesting aspects of the pandemic were that there was a Reliance on video appearances which allows you to remain in your office and still appear in court I think some of that will stick settlement conferences are sometimes Now by Zoom it allows you to be more efficient I had a jury trial in Alameda County on a eviction that was Exempted from the moratorium because it involved health and safety and I had a jury trial where the jurors appeared on the screen like The Brady Bunch where they had different boxes and I would speak to the jury by remote and not something I want to do all the time but something that you know I had to do on behalf of a client oh fantastic if somebody has a particular real estate case that regard regarding evictions Consulting in Los Angeles or Northern California in those counties what's the best way for them to reach out to your office my easiest approach is by email [email address] and I'll say it again [email address] I found that chasing phone calls is always a race to futility and an email is for me the best way to

51:21 Engage and if you email me you'll get an email response back within 24 hours and if I can't help you out I can provide you a referral and if it's an easy question I'm happy to answer and if it's a more cumbersome question I'll ask for a half hour meeting with you fantastic well I'll put the details in the show notes as well so anybody who's watching this on the live stream again Daniel, bornstein.law and I just can't tell much I appreciate the time with you today it's been fantastic I know I learned a lot both about the eviction process but more importantly just remember the business of law in the business of working with customers it's just been a fantastic experience I'm back everybody on the call today and watching thank you so much I really appreciate you it's my pleasure it's a privilege to participate and you know so kudos to you for being involved in this and communicating so successfully with client base it's something that I appreciate as well when I see it well great thanks so much and for the rest of you it's Probate Weekly we do it every Thursday 4 P.M Pacific 7 PM Eastern we live stream it on YouTube and Facebook you can watch recordings there you go to episodesweekly.com if you want to see the past episodes you can come in live if you go to probateweekly.com you can register for the zoom come in live and ask questions and participate in the chat in a network with other people on the call glad to have you guys Network in fact before we finish you might want to put your names addresses phone numbers email addresses or whatever you're looking for put in the chat we'll save that and distribute that as appropriate thank you so much everybody have a fantastic week and we'll see you guys next week all the best thank you very much thanks again appreciate it