Entries Tagged 'Featured' ↓

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Fulton County, Georgia, which encompasses the city of Atlanta is about to raise taxes significantly on many of it’s commercial properties. The median tax increase will be 44 percent, meaning that half of the properties will see increases of more than that.

For those with tenants and a fixed rent this could really hurt ones cash flow. Such a drastic hit to the bottom line will definately have an impact on property values.

Assessors have spent the past 30 days trying to get the word out to business property owners, real estate agents, property managers, tax consultants and others so the figures won’t be so shocking when they arrive in mailboxes as soon as Tuesday.
The numbers are going up so dramatically because Fulton has just completed a two-year, $4.1 million project to revalue every commercial property everywhere in the county, including the 14 municipalities. The county brought in consultants to review the market and update records for the first time in 15 years.
The change is so dramatic that Fulton officials say the tax base, in a county with properties already valued by assessors at $136 billion, should jump about $18 billion from the commercial revaluation alone. via ajc.com.

Interesting tidbit I found reading an article on Republican candidate John McCain changing his position on the foreclosure problem in the country. Political pundits are surmising that as long as we do not have a major terrorist attack, housing will be the dominant issue in the upcoming presidential election.

That should be fairly interesting as it will pit a Republican free market concept versus a Democratic government intervention approach for the American people to decide upon. What scares me is that if the Democratic candidate wins they will be compelled to make changes in how homes are sold in the country with another level of bureaucracy.

“Absent a major act of terrorism, housing will be the major issue of the campaign,” noted Jaret Seiberg, a policy analyst with the Sanford Group in Washington, D.C.

Recalling the famous political maxim ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ that emerged from the 1992 campaign between Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush, Seiberg said the 2008 maxim might well be “It’s the housing, stupid.”

McCain, according to Seiberg, did his best “to stay true to the conservative perspective on this – ‘you don’t need the government to pick winners and losers, you let the market do that.’ But, unfortunately, to get elected president you need more than just conservative voters. You need the middle class, and the middle class today is very nervous about the state of the housing market.” via Fox News.

Hate traffic? If so these are the cities you probably want to avoid. Washington D.C. leads the list as huge levels of government hiring have choked the infrastructure and created perpetual bottlenecks on most of the highways. Coming in second is Atlanta, Georgia. When I moved here in 1991 everything was 20 minutes away. The newly built and refurbished interstate system was humming and traffic problems were fairly rare. But since adding over a million new residents in the past decade traffic is one of the worst problems the region faces.

Here are all 10 of the worst cities for traffic as put together by Forbes Magazine.

Top 10 Cities With The Worst Traffic:

1. Washington D.C.
2. Atlanta, GA
3. Los Angeles, CA
4. San Francisco, CA
5. Houston, TX
6. New York, NY
7. Riverside – San Bernardino, CA
8. Chicago, IL
9. Dallas, TX
10. Boston, MA.