Leighton Realty Rentals will attend the 2009 Brewster in Bloom festival on Cape Cod. We will have a booth in the Antique & Collectible Fair on April 2nd and 3rd located at Little Drummer Boy park just off 6A in Brewster. Come by and say hello and bring your Cape Cod Real Estate Rental and Sales questions with you. See you there.
Welcome aboard Sonja Fellman. Sonja recently joined our Cape Cod rental booking staff to assist us with our ever increasing web traffic and call volume. She hails from Chatham and now lives in Yarmouth. With her years of customer service experience, she will be a great addition to the Leighton Realty Rental family to assist home owners and renters on Cape Cod.
As of April 24th, there are 4 condo under agreement at The Ocean Edge Resort waiting to be sold. All 4 of these properties are listed with my office! No other company has any other Ocean Edge condo listings under agreement.
Since January 1st 2009, 3 Ocean Edge condos have sold. One was a bank owned property. The other 2 were my listings. The statistics show if you list your Ocean Edge condo with me for sale, you can actually sell it.
Other companies will say they have top search engine ranking on sites such as Google and Yahoo for Ocean Edge condos, but if you test it yourself, you will find Michael Leighton at the top everywhere. They say proof is in the pudding. In this case, it is online.
In our continuing efforts to explore new marketing avenues, Leighton Realty Rentals hosted a booth at the Lower Cape Business Expo held on April 4th at the Four Points Sheridan in Eastham. The event was organized by the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce to promote the diverse local goods and services that we have available on the Cape. The turnout was excellent and we look forward to participating in other Cape expos.
Lower Cape Cod Home Expo - Eastham
The Cape Cod Times just published this article Room Tax Expansion Sought – April 8th 2009. It is difficult to be sympathetic to the failing newspapers when they are producing news articles like this. This article clearly belongs on the Opinion page instead of headlining the Business Section. If anyone read this without knowledge of the issue, they would believe that there is no controversy and no opposition to the tax. I will provide more specific details of yesterday’s hearing on Beacon Hill at a later date.
The Rental Occupancy Tax hearing in front of the Joint Revenue Committee is scheduled for Tuesday, April 7 at 10:00 am in the Garden Auditorium at the state house. The bill sponsors will be there to present their testimony and the public is invited to testify in front of the committee as well. Anyone who can make the meeting is encouraged to attend. If not, please write to the committee members and express your opposition if you have not already done so.
Points to highlight in your letters:
- Not a uniform tax applied to all Cape towns. Harwich has already rejected it, Brewster and Provincetown accepted it, other towns are waiting
- Extremely difficult to administer.
- Of the 9.7% of their rental amount that they will collect and pay due to this tax, less than half of that (4.0%) will actually go to the towns.
- Lack of ability for fair and uniform enforcement
Looking ahead:
The committee will not be voting on this issue during the hearing – they will simply digest the testimony. After that, they can call an Executive Session and vote on it any time. If a vote is not forthcoming, a strong indicator for the bill’s liklihood of success will be whether or not Occupancy Tax revenue appears in the State’s budget. The House will release its budget details in 3 weeks and the Senate 3 weeks later. House debate will take place in late April and the Senate’s in late May.
I will keep you posted!
Ocean Edge Sales Update:
Nothing has sold at Ocean Edge since November 10th 2008. However, my firm has just put a Howland and an Endicott under agreement. I have also received multiple offers on my others properties for sale, but many of the winter offers were coming in very low. Now that Spring is around the corner, the offers will increase both in frequency and price. Just like in my last newsletter, 100% of the condos under agreement at Ocean Edge are with my company. Why would you try and sell with anyone else? Take a look at Ocean Edge Condos Brewster For Sale and see what is currently for sale.
Ocean Edge Rentals Update: Leighton Realty Rentals is now the largest rental company at the Ocean Edge Resort. However, we still need more good condos to rent as we have a surplus of renters who want good condos to rent. We are the only rental company that provides 360 Degree Virtual Property tours. Call us today to see how we can make renting easier and more profitable for you.
I brought my family this Saturday to the Cape Cod Community College’s multi cultural festival. I had never been to this festival before, so I did not know what to expect. The weather was perfect and the food was very good. I really liked how they served very small portions of food from around the world as it allowed my wife and me to sample many different dishes. It was also fun to see the different booths people had set up from many different places. My son enjoyed the bear rug from Finland that was also photographed in the Cape Cod Times. My son Alex is obsessed with Davy Crocket, so it was hard to convince him that was NOT the bear Davy Crockett shot when he was 3.
With 2 little ones, I did not have enough time to experience the music in the auditorium. I was planning on doing that later on, but the smallest needed to take a nap and a 1 ½ year old with no nap is not much fun for anyone. As a result, I had to pass on the music.
Overall, I would say the festival is a very good idea with some very nice attractions. I would also add that it would be best to have a festival like that in a place not so broken up. The Community College is spread out all over the place and it is hard to find where to go and what is going. It would be better to have it in one location. That is just my 2 cents.
On Friday, March 6, Stonybrook Elementary School in Brewster hosted a multicultural fair. The countries represented were from Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America, and the Middle East. The fair featured country display booths, a food area, and an activity area. Upon entrance to the fair, the children were given special passports to be stamped by the countries that were visited. This event was organized by a school parent group with help from outside vendors and volunteers. I helped with the country displays by manning the Middle East booth and providing display materials.
I spoke with the Director of the Joint Revenue Committee on Beacon Hill to get an update on the Rental Occupancy Tax issue. He told me that their committee received the first 400 batch of bills last week Friday, March 6th and that there are more to come. Busy year for the Revenue Committee!! It will be at least another 2 weeks before the calendar of hearings will be published, and at that time that we will know when the bill is up for review and for vote. The bill was sponsored in the House by Sarah Peake and in the Senate by Robert O’Leary – both of Cape Cod. Should the bill pass, it is only properties in Brewster and Provincetown that would be impacted at this point. However, other towns (with the exception of Harwich which already voted no) can expect the vote to come up this Spring.
I have attached the link that lists the members of the Revenue committee:
http://www.mass.gov/legis/comm/j26.htm
I would encourage you all to write to these committee members (as well as you own reps if you are a resident of Mass) to argue your points against the passage of this bill. The Brewster Association of Part-Time Residents has put together the following arguments against the tax in Brewster that could be useful in your letters – no matter which town has jurisdiction over your property.
- All Cape Cod towns would need to participate to avoid penalizing those that do. Brewster owners of rental property will have a substantial competitive price disadvantage (9.7% higher) against owners of similar properties in Harwich, Chatham, Orleans, Eastham, and other Cape Cod towns, These owners will lose rentals, and Brewster merchants will lose business unless the proposed tax applies to the entire Cape.
- If the tax only applies to Brewster, it is likely that the Brewster owner will have to pay this tax out of his pocket. He may not be able to collect it from the out-of-state renter unless every Cape property owner is also collecting it.
- This tax would be extremely difficult to administer. One can envision a new bureaucracy involved in registration, licensing, and inspection of rental properties which would consume much of the revenues anticipated to be gained from the tax prior to paying the State its piece, and the smaller portion finally reaching the town’s general fund).
- Of the 9.7% of their rental amount that they will collect and pay due to this tax, less than half of that (4.0%) will actually go to the Town of Brewster. Do we wish to add onto a vacationer’s rental fee almost $100 on each $1,000 spent on rental of accommodations, and have well less than half of that be of benefit to Brewster?
- Enforcement will be hard to accomplish. No one knows how many private rentals there are and compliance among property owners will likely be uneven. The “honest” owners of such rental units, who already pay personal property tax, real estate tax, state income tax (on Schedule E), and federal income tax (again on Schedule E) will collect and pay another (i.e. fifth tax) on their rentals. However, the “not so honest” would not be likely to pay this additional proposed room tax, as private renting of a vacation property is the quintessential example of a “cash business”, and as such, taxation involving it is based almost exclusively on the “self-reporting” of revenues. Taxes and fees have an obligation to be 1) fairly imposed and 2) uniformly collected, and this proposed tax has no provision for the latter. This proposed tax has very real potential for lack of uniform compliance that would put those who follow the law at a distinct competitive disadvantage (to those who don’t).
I will keep you posted!
If you know anyone interested in renting take a look at Vacation Rentals on Cape Cod
