Rentals

"Selling L.A. " reality show viewers may wonder if any of the featured homes actually sell. Although perhaps not in time for the closing credits, some houses under consideration for the show do find a buyer outside the roving eye of the camera. One home that agent Rebekah Schwartz was promoting to HGTV for its 15 minutes of fame was the Marina del Rey pad that former Laker Lamar Odom rented a few years back. Listed at $1.995 million in January, it closed early this month at $1.825 million.

Video-on-demand services usually come into play toward the end of a film's life span — either to follow a theatrical run or to take a movie straight to video. For the website Prescreen, however, VOD is the launching pad. Prescreen, which debuted in September, offers users a curated selection of independent films, most available for 60 days and many exclusive to the site. A single film is spotlighted in a daily email, and most rentals cost $2 to $8 for a 48-hour viewing window.

The hottest thing in movie rentals is as old as the Coke machine -- and just as red. Redbox movie kiosks are popping up by the thousands in supermarkets, drugstores, restaurants and convenience stores around the country. The kiosks stock DVDs that rent for $1 a day, a remainder-bin price that is less than a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

"Selling L.A. " reality show viewers may wonder if any of the featured homes actually sell. Although perhaps not in time for the closing credits, some houses under consideration for the show do find a buyer outside the roving eye of the camera. One home that agent Rebekah Schwartz was promoting to HGTV for its 15 minutes of fame was the Marina del Rey pad that former Laker Lamar Odom rented a few years back. Listed at $1.995 million in January, it closed early this month at $1.825 million.

The recent craze for converting apartment buildings to condominiums, which is drawing political heat in Los Angeles and elsewhere, may be slowed by market forces before City Hall has a chance to act. One possible indication of a coming slump was the number of people willing to pay $1,800 for investment advice on the topic.

The Los Angeles Housing Authority will begin reissuing rent subsidies to hundreds of families whose aid was abruptly terminated more than a year ago when the agency found it had no more money, officials announced Thursday. "Praise God," said Doris Young, whose voucher was canceled shortly before she and her two daughters, ages 12 and 16, were to move into a South Los Angeles duplex. "This is like a dream come true.

Question: The building I live in is being sold and the manager gave me an estoppel agreement to sign. What is it for? Should I sign it? Answer: An estoppel agreement is a document that details a host of promises and conditions, oral and written, made between the tenant and owner. Usually a page long, this fill-in-the-blank-type certificate is a comprehensive list of pre-existing conditions, agreements and legal promises made between landlord and tenant.

For the first time in almost four years, the Orange County Housing Authority will accept applications for a federal program providing $45 million in subsidized rents to low-income families. Advocates for the poor said the new program offers a rare opportunity for thousands of families, but stressed that it won't make much of a dent in the county's affordable housing shortage. Rents have climbed to an all-time high in Orange County, averaging more than $1,000 a month.

Major rental car companies are systematically funneling wrecked automobiles into the used-car market without making proper disclosure or providing salvage titles as required by state law, a series of lawsuits has alleged in recent months. Auto safety advocates say public safety is being jeopardized by many thousands of seriously damaged rental vehicles put back on the road every year in California alone by a network of rental car companies, salvage vehicle auctioneers and secondary repair shops.

Here's an idea for a cheap point-to-point road trip : Rent a car in Arizona, go exploring and drop it off in one of nine other states --including California -- for just $5 a day. That's the offer Hertz is making for one-way trips out of the Grand Canyon State. The deal: The Arizona Drive for $5 offer applies for rentals that begin in Arizona and then are dropped off at selected locations in California , Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Utah and Washington.

No doubt about it: Peer-to-peer vacation rentals - that is, short-term rentals done through such sites as Airbnb or Wimdu - usually are a bargain. They enable you to save money by letting you dine in for a meal or two because most come with access to a kitchen. But some are far away from the attractions that were the impetus for the vacation in the first place, which means getting there can cause the bargain to lose some luster. Further, some owners have found they are at risk: In a case that created plenty of social media buzz, one owner in San Francisco complained that her place had been trashed.

Question: I own two houses on the same street. I live in one and rent out the other. The tenants in the rental house have seven months left on their lease. I would like to move my wife's mother into the rental house so she can move out of my house. Will I be able to do that? Answer: A lease is an agreement that is binding on all parties to it, tenant and landlord. Some leases have "escape clauses" that allow either party to cancel upon giving notice, typically 30 days. If the lease agreement you used for this rental does not include an escape clause, you have no general right to unilaterally cancel the lease.

The average Los Angeles County rent is predicted to soar nearly 10% over the next two years, leading a resurgence of the costly Southland apartment lifestyle. Southern California's economic recovery may be halting and tepid, but young workers gaining new employment, a demand for apartment living and scarce construction of units are creating a rental squeeze in the region, according to a report released Wednesday by USC's Lusk Center for Real Estate. The report is the latest evidence that the rental market is on an upswing, an early indicator that housing may be headed into recovery even as home prices tumble to fresh lows.

A new report predicts the market for foreclosed homes that are turned into rentals will be worth more than $100 billion this year. Rents are on the rise as home prices fall . That has policymakers promoting the idea that selling foreclosed homes to investors as rentals could be a positive for the housing market -- helping take down the inventory of distressed properties and putting a floor on prices. Last week, the Federal Reserve released guidelines that could encourage the practice of converting lender-owned foreclosed homes into rental properties.

The Federal Reserve has released guidelines that could encourage the practice of converting lender-owned foreclosed homes into rental properties. By converting foreclosures to rentals with steady cash flow, banks could reduce the number of their "substandard assets," a classification used by banking regulators to determine the health of banks. The central bank also said that lenders could receive Community Reinvestment Act credit for providing housing to low-income and moderate-income people by successfully converting foreclosed homes into rentals.

Google Inc.'s YouTube has struck a movie-rental deal with a fifth major Hollywood studio, Paramount Pictures, adding 500 titles to its expanding online library. The addition of Paramount's films brings YouTube's rental library to nearly 9,000 titles, featuring such popular mainstream movies as Martin Scorsese's Academy Award-winning "Hugo" and director Michael Bay's action-packed "Transformers" and classics including "The Godfather. " The deal reflects YouTube's strategy to provide its millions of online viewers with a range of entertainment options, from its trademark user-created video and polished Web originals to professional long-form content.

College textbooks are getting a bit more affordable. Amazon.com Inc. on Monday said it launched a program in which college students can rent digital copies of "tens of thousands of textbooks" at a fraction of the cost of buying them. The online retailer said the rental fees could be as much as 80% lower than the purchase price. Students can rent a textbook for as few as 30 days or up to 360 days, with fees based on how long the book is rented, Amazon said. Rentals can be read on Amazon's Kindle e-reader, as well as Macs and PCs that have the Kindle app. They can also be read on smartphones and tablet computers running the Apple iOS, Microsoft Windows Phone 7 and Google Android operating systems.

For those who like renting movies, Hollywood may soon have a message: Prepare to wait. In an effort to push consumers toward buying more movies, some major film studios are considering a new policy that would block DVDs from being offered for rental until several weeks after going on sale. Under the plan, new DVD releases would be available on a purchase-only basis for a few weeks, after which time companies such as Blockbuster Inc. and Netflix Inc. would be allowed to rent the DVDs to their customers.

Each spring Hertz runs a one-way rental offer: Pick up a compact or economy car in Arizona, drop it off in California and pay $5 a day for the rental. Bigger cars are included in this deal too at equally low rates. The deal: I took Hertz up on this offer last year and spent 13 days driving more than 3,400 miles around the Southwest in a Nissan Versa. Sound insane? Maybe, but my car rental cost totaled $65, not including gas. Hertz makes this offer to reposition rental cars that have accumulated in warm-weather states during the winter.