Have you ever owned a vacant lot?  I have owned a few vacant lots in the past, and have always been amazed how people view a vacant lot as public property.  What do I mean by “public property”?  A few years ago my wife and I owned a vacant piece of canal front property.  One day, I received a code violation from Collier County stating that parking my boat on my vacant lot was a code violation and that it needed to be moved within a few short days.  Here’s the thing – I didn’t own a boat.

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I have been involved in real estate in one form or the other for over twenty years. It all started in 1990 when I started my first real estate related job working for a  title company in Michigan while going to law school.  I learned how to search titles the old fashioned way – manually through the libor books.  If you don’t know what a libor book is, think of a book that is a couple of inches thick, but about the size of a desk – and no, I am not exaggerating.  I would manually look through book after book until I traced the property up to the current date.  Although very interesting to look through the books, some being well over a hundred years old, it was very inefficient compared to today’s standards. Continue reading →

Its a Friday afternoon, and I have spent most of the day meeting with clients, preparing files for upcoming closings, reviewing short sale files, getting ready for court Monday morning and making sure everything is running smoothly.  In other words, a typical day.  The one place that I am not is out for a three hour lunch or an early tee time on the golf course. Continue reading →