The Successful Landlord Blog

I’m kinda happy about this. I have taken steps to aquire the domain name LANDLORDSUCCESS.COM (without the hyphen). I think it will be easier for readers to remember and get here especially if they forget the hyphen.

At the time I registered LANDLORD-SUCCESS.COM I think that the name without the hyphen was taken although I can’t find it in The Wayback Machine for some reason.
Anyway, that’s about it. I made the mistake myself of typing it in with out the hyphen and the page I landed on mentioned that it was available for sale. So…..YAY me!

The Brevard County, Florida residential housing rental market has been very disappointing lately. There are still around 200 available rental units in the local rental market including single-family houses and many apartments. So much so, that the other day I noticed more than one teenager out of school for the holidays holding large “for rent” signs by the roadside, presumably being paid a few dollars for their trouble.

Thus far, I have decided to list the property that has been empty for about 2 months now on Google Base, Rent.com and my own web site. News paper advertising here in town is pretty dismal.

Florida Today which is the larger “local” paper in this area has taken to gouging advertisers, especially of real estate, so much so that the number of advertisers is in a decline. The other local paper which is a free “community” paper has raised their advertising rates since the number of properties for rent has increased.

This increase in the number of properties for rent has been fueled mostly by investors buying single-family homes at pre-construction prices and hoping to either sell them before they get built or at least sell them at a profit after they get built as well as every Tom, Dick & Harry buying houses to flip them. See item #1 of the previous link.
The other reason for the glut in the rental market seems to be the multitude of multi-family housing being built nationwide as well as locally. I have seen many apartment complexes advertising three months free rent, no credit checks, and other move-in incentives.

I’m not that worried about the increases in the multi-family market because typically it’s more desirable to live in a detached house than an apartment.

So, I’ve decided to spruce up the blog for the new year. One of my resolutions for 2007 is to pay more attention to this site and really try to built it out. You may have noticed some of the changes already but I have added a list below for your reading pleasure.

• A new contact page so you can email me directly from the blog.
• Changed the RSS feed mechanism to go through Feedburner.
• A link to Technorati so you can us to your favorites.
• A new “dropcap” plug-in which debuts with this post.
• Some invisible Search Engine Optimization (SEO) changes.
• A couple of spam prevention plug-ins.

I’ll be adding some other new features in the coming weeks so stay tuned. Also, I plan to post a lot more than I have in the past (one of my new years resolutions for 2007). You will also see a broader scope of topics including general real estate industry subjects, mortgage industry subjects and real estate trend information.

Enjoy!