I just got out of a class titled Marijuana and Real Estate.. The class was offered by Williams Title in Cherry Creek. The course was expertly presented by John Gillam. He works down in the college/ tourist town of Durango, Colorado.
Basically, the Colorado medical and recreational marijuana situation should remain fairly steady until the elections boil down. January 1st, 2017 will be the day that the feds might get involved again, depending who is in office. You see, the executive branch, with Obama’s wink, is choosing not to prosecute the schedule 1 marijuana laws that keep marijuana in the same category as cocaine and heroin. Who knows, they may switch marijuana to a schedule 2 which would be in the same class as pharmaceuticals, like oxycontin, opiates, that kind of thing, then you would hypothetically be getting a federally backed prescription.
As for now, in the last 7 years or so, the executive branch has not prosecuted marijuana in a federal sense. If the executive branch and the new president decided to prosecute and say…. give everyone 30 days to remove all federally illegal material, AKA schedule 1 substances, the commercial real estate market in Denver Colorado would certainly crash immediately, soon followed by the rest of the state.
The other thing gleaned from course, was that landlords can allow or not allow medical marijuana to be grown on the premises. If the feds got involved this may change…it may become what? a medical right?
He also hit on…When showing homes or taking a listing: keep an eye out for mmj, or edibles, just like you would ipads, prescription drugs and guns, request that they be stored under lock and key.
John also covered what to look out for as far as inspection. In other words, keep an eye out for do it yourself wiring. Growers have been known to go around the breakers and then run maybe some water lines above that wiring, throw a bag of fertilizer in the room and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. If you mix combustibles like fertilizer with inventive wiring, and water… something is bound to happen.
Lastly we went over the theory of 6 ….so under the state statute as it stands, each adult person is allowed 6 plants, so in a three bedroom home with two adults per bedroom you could theoretically have 6 people with 6 plants each. They could be growing 36 plants legally in the house. He is seeing this situation often in the college town of Durango.
The class was great and I certainly would recommend it to all of my colleagues with homes for sale in the Denver Colorado area.