I noticed that on the filing, they also included the US Dept of Treasury as a defendant so I did a judgment search at the state and county level.

Additionally, the Treasury Department and the IRS decline to adopt a position deeming all rental real estate activity to be a trade or business for purposes of section 199A.

The MI Dept. of Treasury has a prop. tax estimator which is helpful but this might not always be up to date: https://treas-secure.state.mi.us/ptestimator/PTEstimator.asp

The current 30 year treasury rate is 3% and it is tax free.

The only place I would invest in the stock market is in US Treasuries. 

. - Property Taxes: I've looked on the NJ websites (https://www.state.nj.us/treasury/taxation/lpt/taxr...) to pin down the appropriate property tax rate but not sure if this is the right place to look.

It will be about $6.25 for each status report so it can add up pretty quickly if you are doing a lot of them.NJ Division Revenue website here: https://www.nj.gov/treasury/revenue/guiderequest.shtml

US Treasuries are the usual benchmark or similar indexes, so it’s a return over risk calculation.The big money (Goldman’s, sovereign wealth funds etc) for a while now has concluded that real estate is a safe play even at 4% with the possibility of being actually profitable as well.

Property value is 325000,  loan balance is 162000 and adjusting upwards over the last several months. now at 4.99 and moving upward being tied to the treasury index.

Now compare the options: treasuries are low, savings and cds are insanely low and locked in, stocks great return lately but highly volatile and pretty high price to earnings.If you are a smaller investor you can do much worse than finding a decent but not spectacular deal in a class A asset.