Trust This.
By Joseph E. Seagle, Esq.
👋 Happy Friday! Today is National Peanut Better Cookie Day. Those are best with homemade ice cream, just in case you were wondering.
1 big thing: Pulte's dual DNI/FHFA role is rewriting your rate sheet
President Trump nominated and then (last evening) pulled the nomination of Bill Pulte — the sitting FHFA Director — for acting Director of National Intelligence. The market response was immediate: investors started demanding higher yields on mortgage-backed securities, anticipating that Pulte's divided attention will freeze the FHFA's affordability agenda.
Why This Reshapes Florida Borrowing Power
Florida buyers and refinancers don't care about Beltway dual-hatting in the abstract. They care because mortgage rates follow MBS yields, and MBS yields just moved on regulatory-uncertainty risk. Even a 0.25% bump on a standard 30-year loan trims a buyer's purchasing power by tens of thousands of dollars — enough to push a Tampa, Orlando, or Naples buyer out of the price band they were preapproved for last month.
What's NOT changing: the 2026 conforming loan limits are locked in by statute — $832,750 in baseline areas and $1,249,125 in high-cost counties (Monroe, Collier, Palm Beach). Pulte has publicly confirmed he has no intention of lowering them. The ceiling stays put. It's the rate path under the ceiling that's moving.
What's also not moving — and that's part of the problem: every adjacent FHFA initiative is now expected to slide. The proposed portable mortgage product designed to let homeowners carry a low rate to a new house. The updated credit-scoring rollout. Capital rule changes at Fannie and Freddie. All on the back burner while the director runs intelligence briefings on the other side of Washington.
What to Execute and Watch
For home services businesses — HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing — expect refinance pipelines to compress and a softer purchase pipeline through Q3. Your customers are the same people who just lost purchasing power. Time renewal pitches accordingly.
For real estate investors and private lenders — non-QM and DSCR lenders gain pricing power as agency rates climb. If you've been waiting on the portable mortgage product to support move-up listings, build a Plan B. The product is now a 2027 conversation at the earliest.
For licensed professionals — physicians, dentists, attorneys — locking a rate before close matters more than usual. Float-downs are cheap insurance in a directionless-regulator market.
The Bottom Line
The Senate confirmation timeline — had Pulte remained the nominee — would have determined whether this is a one-quarter rate jolt or a structural drag through the back half of 2026. Pulte's FHFA tenure has already been heavy on tweets and light on Fannie/Freddie capital rule changes. Adding DNI wouldn’t have made the housing-policy agenda faster.
Watch for: Senate confirmation hearings, the next FHFA agenda announcement, Fannie/Freddie capital-rule comment periods, and the 30-year fixed at the next Friday close. (Sources: American Banker, Scotsman Guide, FHFA loan-limit data.)
2. Florida homeowners are lifting houses instead of leaving them
A Madeira Beach homeowner is raising her Pinellas County house 24 feet into the air — believed to be the tallest single-family home lift on record in the state. The elevation alone is costing $575,000, with structural reconstruction taking the project past the end of 2026. It's also the latest data point in a quiet but accelerating shift across Florida's coastal counties.
Why it matters
After Hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024 — which together generated more than 78,000 flood insurance claims and an estimated $10+ billion in losses, per FEMA — Florida's coastal owners are running a different math problem. Insurance premiums keep climbing. NFIP rates restructured under Risk Rating 2.0 are no longer a hedge for low-elevation parcels. Elevation moves a home out of the SFHA risk pool, sometimes dropping the premium by 70-90%, and locks in resale value for the next buyer's insurance review.
What changes in practice
For an elevation project to pencil, three things usually align: (a) the lot is in a Pinellas, Sarasota, Lee, or Monroe County flood zone, (b) the owner has a documented history of repetitive losses, and (c) federal or state subsidy is on the table. FEMA's Flood Mitigation Assistance program can fund up to 100% of an elevation for owners with four or more NFIP claims in a 10-year window. The state's Elevate Florida initiative, launched February 2026, adds a state-level grant stack on top of the federal program.
For home services businesses — particularly mechanical contractors, electricians, and stucco/exterior trades — elevation projects open a 6-to-12-month rebuild scope per house. Build relationships with house-moving firms now; the structural columns go in first, the trades follow.
For real estate investors — pre-lift and post-lift values diverge sharply. A house elevated 12-24 feet in a Pinellas flood corridor can appraise 15-25% higher than its identical-floorplan neighbor at grade. That's a usable underwriting signal.
The Florida Takeaway
For Florida property owners with a Pinellas, Sarasota, or Lee County address and a history of flooding, the federal and state programs are real, and the math now works in more cases than it used to. The 24-foot Madeira Beach lift is the headline, but the routine 10-to-14-foot projects in Treasure Island, St. Petersburg, and Sanibel are the trend.
What's Next: Watch the 2026 Atlantic hurricane forecast (peak season starts August), Florida's Risk Rating 2.0 premium notices for non-elevated coastal properties, and whether Elevate Florida's first funding round closes oversubscribed. (Source: WFLA News Channel 8 via Newsweek, FEMA NFIP data, Florida Division of Emergency Management.)
This weeks’ “Ask Joe” edition of the Trust This podcast focuses on how land trusts and other trusts fit into 1031 exchanges.
3. Can your land trust do a 1031 exchange? The answer depends on the trust.
Florida real estate investors hold rental property in trusts for a reason — privacy, creditor protection, easy beneficiary transitions. When it's time to sell and 1031 the proceeds into a replacement property, the same taxpayer rule turns into the first question every qualified intermediary asks. The answer depends entirely on what kind of trust holds title.
The big picture: IRC § 1031 requires that the taxpayer who relinquishes the property is the same taxpayer who acquires the replacement property. When title is in a trust, "same taxpayer" depends on whether the IRS treats the trust as transparent / disregarded (you and the trust are one taxpayer) or as a separate entity. Get the answer wrong, and the deferral fails — the whole gain hits in the year of sale.
Why it matters:
Florida land trusts hold title for the vast majority of investor purchases in the state - disregarded by the IRS.
Revocable living trusts hold the same title for estate-planning purposes - disregarded by the IRS
Some investors use Delaware Statutory Trusts (DSTs) as a parking lot for 1031 proceeds when no replacement is identified in time - disregarded by the IRS
Irrevocable trusts are created by a trust settlor/maker/grantor with a different trustee and a different beneficiary - definitely not disregarded by the IRS and has its own taxpayer identification number.
Each of these is treated differently under § 1031 — and the mistake is usually discovered at closing, when it's too late to restructure
What most people don't know: A Florida land trust is treated as transparent or disregarded for 1031 purposes — the beneficiary, not the trustee, is the taxpayer. The IRS confirmed this in Rev. Rul. 92-105, which addressed Illinois land trusts and reasoned that a land trustee is "merely an agent" holding bare title for the beneficiary. Florida's land trust statute (Fla. Stat. § 689.071) creates the same arrangement — the beneficiary controls management, collects earnings, and pays taxes. The IRS treats the beneficial interest as real property, fully eligible for like-kind exchange treatment.
Key takeaways:
Revocable grantor trust — fully transparent. Same taxpayer regardless of whether title is in your name or the trust's. You can sell from the trust and buy back into your individual name (or vice versa) without breaking the exchange.
Florida land trust — treated as real property in the hands of the beneficiary, per Rev. Rul. 92-105 reasoning. The beneficiary's interest is exchangeable under § 1031.
Delaware Statutory Trust (DST) — separate entity by default. Eligible for 1031 only if it qualifies as a "trust" under Rev. Rul. 2004-86 (trustee's powers are limited to collecting and distributing income — no power to renegotiate leases, refinance debt, or exchange the property). Most syndicated DST products are drafted specifically to meet this test.
Irrevocable non-grantor trust — separate taxpayer. The trust itself must complete the exchange. The grantor cannot acquire the replacement property in their personal name. Beneficiaries cannot either. Miss this, and the deferral is gone.
Where people go wrong:
Selling out of a Florida land trust and buying back into the grantor's individual name — that one works, but isn't documented at closing, and the QI flags it after the fact.
Selling from an irrevocable trust and trying to take title personally on the replacement leg — fatal to the exchange.
Using a DST whose trust agreement gives the trustee active management powers disqualifies the trust as a § 1031 vehicle.
Failing to confirm that the Form 1099-S is issued in the correct taxpayer's name. A 1099-S in the wrong name is a red flag that the IRS routinely catches.
The bottom line: The Florida land trust + revocable living trust combination is one of the most flexible structures in the country for 1031 planning — but only when the beneficiary lineage is documented before you sign the QI agreement. If the trust changed hands recently, or the beneficiary is itself an LLC or another trust, the same-taxpayer chain has to be traced through every link. (Florida-only framing: Rev. Rul. 92-105's logic applies to Florida land trusts because the structure mirrors Illinois. Out-of-state readers should verify their state's land-trust treatment with local counsel — California, Hawaii, Indiana, North Dakota, and Virginia have similar statutes; most other states do not.)
Go deeper: Read the full long-form article on aspirelegal.com, and download this week's Florida Land Trust 1031 Compatibility Guide (free PDF) — a decision tree across the four trust types plus a same-taxpayer audit checklist for closing.
4. "I'm all caught up" — the four scariest words for any founder
Four bear cubs came up on the porch to see what was in the Amazon box last week. That was a mess.
Edward keeps a list of things he's caught up on. The list is currently zero items long, and he's at peace with it.
There's a moment every Friday afternoon when an entrepreneur leans back, looks at a quiet inbox, and thinks the four scariest words in operating a business: I'm all caught up.
The Big Idea: Two diagnoses, one symptom
"Caught up" looks the same on the calendar. It feels different in the gut. Two versions:
Version A — the market has slowed, your pipeline is thin, your team is starting to coast, and the calendar emptied because the business actually stopped. This is the version that ends with a layoff conversation in six weeks.
Version B — your systems are running, the right people are in the right seats, KPIs are landing in the green every Monday, and the calendar emptied because you successfully built yourself out of the day-to-day. This is the version where you exhale, then go work on the next 90-day Rocks.
Without a scoreboard, you can't tell which version you're in until it's too late to act on Version A.
The Filter: People + Systems + KPIs
The EOS answer to "which one am I in?" runs on three legs:
People: Is every seat on the Accountability Chart filled with a Right Person, Right Seat? When the calendar empties, does the team self-direct, or does productivity stall the moment you're not assigning work?
Systems: Are your documented processes still being followed when you're not watching? An L10 (Level 10 meeting) on Mondays, an issues list, a documented sales process — the Version B operator can name the SOP for any recurring task.
KPIs: Is the scorecard green on revenue, gross margin, pipeline coverage, and customer retention? A scorecard with leading indicators tells you whether the quiet is structural (you built it) or external (the market is taking it from you).
Where founders get stuck
No scorecard at all — the calendar is the only signal, and the calendar can't tell the two versions apart.
A scorecard that tracks only lagging indicators (last month's revenue, last quarter's profit). By the time those flash red, the slowdown is six weeks old.
A team that can't run without the founder. Caught-up time becomes "I'd better go make some sales calls" — and the founder slides right back into the technician seat.
Bottom Line: "Caught up" without a scoreboard is the founder's blind spot. With People + Systems + KPIs in place, "caught up" is what success actually looks like. You earned it. Go work on the business — not in it.
This Week's Challenge: Pull out your scorecard. If you don't have one, write a 5-line version this afternoon — three leading indicators, two lagging. Tape it to the wall. Next Monday morning, fill it in before you open your email. If it's all green and the calendar is open, congratulations — Version B. Now go work the Rocks.
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