For a rental, not a purchase.
(Apologies to Tom Waits.)
For one thing, houses in SoCal-with or without basements-are expensive.
But the other thing the other thing, the other thing is under the tangled bowl of day-old schizophrenic spaghetti that is the drug laws, if the cops bust your grow house and you own it, they can confiscate that $600,000 investment. So not only do you lose your dope and your freedom, you lose your down payment and every mortgage payment you’ve already made, and you still owe the bank the balance of the loan.
But if you rent the house and the landlord can reasonably claim he didn’t know you were using it to cultivate a felony, he gets to keep his property and you go to jail free of that karma, anyway.
So Ben and Chon went looking to rent a house that
Had a basement
Wasn’t too close to neighbors
Wasn’t anywhere near a school or a playground (maximum sentencing under the guidelines)
Or a police station
Could be rewired
And where the landlord wouldn’t be coming around every twenty-eight minutes
Or ever.
This narrowed down the possibilities.
You can’t just put an ad in the paper stating your requirements, because the police will be happy to rent to you-they have some of these houses in stock You ain’t gonna find it on Craigslist
(Well, not that Craigslist-see below.)
You need
A Realtor.