The Successful Landlord Blog

Ok, so here’s a good one. Today I received a survey in the mail from the City of Palm Bay (Florida) asking whether I would consider paying to connect to a reclaimed water source presumably to water the grass at one of my rental properties.

To be honest, I had to laugh. First off, I don’t water the grass at ANY of my properties. Thankfully, the lawn is really just weeds but they provide a good ground covering for the beach sand that is most of Florida.

Second, the City of Palm Bay, by law, orders that if you own property, even if it’s vacant, you MUST pay for garbage collection and water/sewer base charges.
Read the rest of this entry »

So, during the run-up to the supposed housing bubble, the local property taxing authorities have been totally taking advantage of rising property prices by jacking up the assessed property values and thereby collecting more money. Somewhat evil, but hey, it’s the government we’re talking about.

Actually what’s even more evil is that the county governments are threatening to raise the millage rate (thereby increasing the percentage of tax they collect) if the Florida state legislature passes a law forcing them to reduce property taxes due to screaming homeowners (see below), but I digress. Read the rest of this entry »

So, today I ran across an interesting article on Digg.com about how in one Chinese city the government will be installing some 20,000 cameras on the streets linked by a computer system programmed to recognize faces of “police suspects” and all supplied by a US company, no less. From the article:

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Read the rest of this entry »