SUNCOMPLAINTS.COM · THE ALLEGED GAMES

Pass-Throughs and Fees: When the Park's Tax Bill Becomes Yours

The lot rent on the sign is not always the bill you pay. Residents in land-lease communities across several states report a second layer: pass-through charges — amounts the park adds to your monthly bill for its own costs, most commonly property taxes, water and sewer charges, and capital improvements to the park's infrastructure.

How it works

In Florida, the mechanism sits inside the state's mobile-home law, Chapter 723: whole sections of the statute are devoted to lot-rental amount composition, pass-through charges and recovery of capital costs for utility improvements (§§ 723.031, 723.046), and the park's prospectus — the disclosure document signed at move-in — is where the authority to charge them lives. The pass-through itself is usually legal. Residents' allegations are about scale, surprise and one-directionality: charges that arrive with little notice, rise with the park's tax assessment (which rises with the park's value, which rises with your rent), and are very hard to audit from a kitchen table.

An attributed example

In a 2023 review on Trustpilot, a resident of La Costa Village in Port Orange alleged that Sun raised lot rent about 6% in a year when Social Security's cost-of-living adjustment was a little over 8%, and separately passed the company's property taxes through to residents. That is one resident's account on a review site — published here as an allegation with its source, the way every third-party account on this site is handled.

What to document

Keep every pass-through notice, note its stated basis and effective date, and photograph your meter readings if utilities are involved. File the figures on your community page: pass-throughs are a category in this site's scoreboard precisely because no regulator currently adds them up across a portfolio.

Sources: Florida Statutes ch. 723 (TOC and §§ 723.031, 723.046); Trustpilot review of La Costa Village (2023), as attributed.

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