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 →