Just a note here to say that the FIRPTA.com blog is reawakening after a long nap. Sorry I've been gone. But I've been good -- speaking and doing deals. Anyway, bookmark the site or subscribe to the RSS feed. I will be reposting, starting tomorrow.

The website is in the process of a redesign. It has been ported to Drupal because of the expansion plans for this site, and I think Drupal will handle those plans better than WordPress would have.

"FIRPTA" is an acronym from the title of a tax law: the Foreign Investment in U.S. Real Property Tax Act of 1980.

I'm going to start writing a series of background posts for nonresident investors in U.S. real estate. The first one went up today (23 January 2005), on how the U.S. (and States and some cities) will tax rental income. More posts will follow. If you have a particular request for a topic that you'd like me to write about, please email me at phil (at) hodgen (dot) com. All of the posts will be in the "FIRPTA FAQ" category.

The comments are on, but with moderation. This is a test to see if the comment spammers find me. 1/17/05. We'll see.

UPDATE: 1/19/05. OK. So far I've had 2 comments, both from the Netherlands (apparently, which I've divined from looking up the IP addresses), neither of which have any links or obvious spam content in them. Hard to tell if they're real comments or not.

UPDATE: I think they're not.

UPDATE: 10 Feb 05. Moderating comments is good. I'm getting online poker spam.

FIRPTA.com is now back, after some technical difficulties. Changes were made: Moveable Type is now history. The site is now driven by Wordpress. Moveable Type seemed inordinately difficult for me to operate. Then, a new licensing regime at Moveable Type meant that I had to look at whether I wanted to plunk down a lot of money for a commercial license (one that I already have for www.hodgen.com but for the older version of Movable Type).