A Not-So Psychic Prediction

Let me tell you about my pal Lisa.

Lisa and I have been friendly for a zillion years. I adore her. About once every six months or so she calls me, asking me to run comps on her home or just asks a basic real estate question.

About a year ago, Lisa and her husband inherited a spare home in the greater East Valley metropolitan areas of Phoenix. Enter Friend of Lisa's.

Last summer, Friend of Lisa's needed a place to crash for just a few weeks. Would it be ok to use Lisa's spare home? Lisa's Hubby obliged. After all, they weren't using it. Why not help a friend out?

For those of you familiar with the Roman calendar, you can now see we are no longer into summer. And for that matter, just a "few weeks" have painfully come and gone with Friend still hanging out, stretching her few weeks to several months.

Last I heard, Lisa and Hubby have reached some sort of agreement with Friend of Lisa's that Friend will now be moving out early November. Of course, none of this is in writing. Lisa and her Husband were handling this with the Friend with the best of intentions when this all started.

Though we weren't discussing any of this when Lisa called me to chat today, I threw in my two cents anyway. "If you have convince your friend to move, come early November, you will need to evict her. The first part of this is by sending her a 30 day notice. Today." I said.

"Evict?" Lisa gasped.

I then proceeded--without solicitation--to explain all the things that can go wrong with the implied agreement they have in place. One of which is that from the two minute background I had just heard, I was pretty sure Lisa's friend isn't as loyal to Lisa as Lisa is to her. Lisa's friend probably wants another month to figure out where she is going to go next--which is what she has done for the past three months.

And then, when push comes to shove come early November, Lisa's friend will probably give Lisa some sort of sob story about why she needs to stay longer. That's why Lisa needs to start putting everything in writing--including a 30 day notice--starting now.

All of this sounds like a bad B-movie plot to Lisa. I am not saying she ignored my advice, but I don't think she took copious notes either.

Now then, I don't have a crystal ball here, but I would be willing to bet this won't be the last time I will be blogging about Lisa's situation.