– Fluvanna’s real estate taxes may jump 39%. Wow.

County Administrator Jay Scudder plans to recommend on March 16 that the Board of Supervisors advertise a rate of 75 cents for fiscal 2012 — a 39 percent increase over the current levy of 54 cents per $100 of assessed value.

– MERS. Get to know this acronym. It’s finally hitting mainstream news.

Judges, lawmakers, lawyers and housing experts are raising piercing questions about MERS, which stands for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, whose private mortgage registry has all but replaced the nation’s public land ownership records. Most questions boil down to this:

How can MERS claim title to those mortgages, and foreclose on homeowners, when it has not invested a dollar in a single loan?

And, more fundamentally: Given the evidence that many banks have cut corners and made colossal foreclosure mistakes, does anyone know who owns what or owes what to whom anymore?

– We had an interesting conversation on Facebook this weekend about the merits and benefits of QR codes … a summation and recap is forthcoming. Basically, are they useful?

– Thanks to a link off a Cville Bubble Blog conversation, I saw this graph. So … has the Charlottesville real estate market bottomed?

– Have you seen Revolutionary Soup’s “wall of local food”?