Florida Real Estate Blog

Tax reform, bah humbug. Think of this. Last year the Mayor of Orlando, that’s right Buddy Dyer increased his budget a whooping 38% because of all this new tax revenue that was coming his way from property taxes. Hum so now our great legislators are going to give back to us a 9% roll back. In my way of thinking they still got away with stealing 29% increase in taxes with little or no increase in demand for services..

So you ask how can I make that statement. Well here is an example of a home built in 1972 that we evaluated. Last years tax was $2,900 when that home was sold for $449,000 in Seminole county taxes go to $7,000. Yep that’s a $4,000 increase, for what? Did we have to add new roads? NO. Did we have to add more police and Fire people? NO. Did we have to add new Schools? No. Get the picture. We need to vote but it should not be for tax reform it should be to replace those individuals that continue to treat our money like their money.

Home selling and buying how easy it used to be. Not today, today you must "have a clue" if you don't want to walk away from your closing empty handed.

C.L.U.E. Report Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange, it is a claims history database maintained by ChoicePoint that allows insurance companies to evaluate homes. It maintains claims for the past 5 years.

Under CLUE guidelines, any homeowners' insurance claim is logged and kept on the database for five years. More than 600 insurers, or nine of every 10 in the industry, provide and share the data.

They report on claims for about 30 kinds of losses, from wind damage to dog bites. A cyber visit to Choicetrust.com will get you a report on every claim against the property filed in the past five years for $12.95. It can only be ordered by the current owner.  I suggest every Realtor coach their new listing to secure one.  It will save a lot of heart ache 3 days before closing when the buyer finds they cannot secure insurance or the price has tripled.