In “How to Find Tax Lien Properties for Sale” the topics we’ll be discussing are:
- County Tax Liens Are Sold in Half of the States in the USA
- Is it Risky Investing in Property Tax Liens?
- Finding Homes for Sale
- Learn More About Property Tax Lien Investing
Want to learn how to invest in low-risk real estate and earn profits beyond your wildest dreams? Would you like to buy mortgage-free homes for pennies on the dollar? Or earn double-digit interest rates secured by real estate? Then you don’t want to miss this FREE Auction List offer.
County Tax Liens Are Sold in Half of the States in the USA
I you want to know how to find tax lien properties for sale, it’s important to be aware that tax lien investing is not centralized. There are over 3,000 counties in the USA, and each county is a separate taxing jurisdiction with its own rules. Roughly half of the counties sell tax liens, and the other half sell tax deeds.
You can purchase tax lien certificates at auctions in over 1,500 counties in states like Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, and Tennessee.
When you invest in tax lien certificates, your money is protected by the county’s property tax code. You’re investing with the government, and getting your return on investment sent back to you by the government. Tax liens are a safe investment if you do your due diligence.
Is it Risky Investing in Property Tax Liens?
What are the risks of tax lien investing? If a tax lien certificate is not redeemed, in other words, if you don’t receive the check with your ROI, then you will get the property. Therefore, you should never buy a tax lien without knowing the condition of the property and the neighborhood since you could end up owning the property.
How can you mitigate the risk? It’s important to go take a look at the property. If you’re not in the area, you could have a broker do it for you.
There are also tools that you can use, like GIS, the Geographic Information System. This is a satellite that you can use to zoom in on properties and get a close look at them and the surrounding neighborhood. The counties are subscribed to the GIS system, and it’s free. Google maps is also useful.
Finding Homes for Sale
The lion’s share of tax lien investing can be done online these days. Property records are online, and even the auctions themselves are held online.
Here’s how to find tax lien properties for sale. To find out when an auction will be held and what properties are up for sale, you can go to the county’s website. There you will find auction announcements, property lists, and the auction rules. Auction announcements and lists are also published in the local newspaper.
In a county like Broward in Florida, you could find as many as 40,000 tax lien certificates up for sale at one auction.
Learn More About Property Tax Lien Investing
If you want to learn more about how to find tax lien properties for sale and invest profitably, view more of Ted’s free videos.
Ted is the authority on the subject of tax lien and tax deed investing and has been teaching students how to buy and sell tax delinquent properties for over 25 years.
If you want to receive a free auction list of tax defaulted properties that are currently for sale, go to TedThomas.com/freegift.
Conclusion
How to find tax lien properties for sale is as simple as going to the county website where you’ll find auction announcements and lists of the properties up for sale. The local newspapers will also contain this information.
Tax lien certificates pay interest rates as high as 36%. They’re sold in a variety of amounts to fit anyone’s budget, and you can purchase them online.
If you’d like to know more, Click here to get started today!
Transcript for
How to Find Tax Lien Properties for Sale
Randy: Thanks for joining us. I’m here with Ted Thomas, who of course is the authority on tax lien certificates and tax auctions and such. Good to see you again, Ted. I’ve got a really simple question for you today about how to find tax lien properties for sale. If I’m looking for a tax lien property that’s up for sale, is there some central online location? If so, where do I get started?
Ted: Well, tax liens basically come from the local county, so that’s really a challenge. Across the United States, there are over 3,000 counties. Over 3000. Each county is a separate jurisdiction, and has its own tax challenges.
Randy: Wow.
Ted: That means they collect the taxes from their local people, and they pay the sheriff and the hospital and things like that. There’s no central place. As a matter of fact, since you asked that question, I’ll show you really quickly that this is an actual tax lien list for Hillsborough County in Tampa, Florida, and it’s a pretty big newspaper. It’s got 30,000 tax liens in it. You can’t see it up close, but that is a list of tax liens.
Randy: That’s just Tampa? That’s one newspaper there.
Ted: That’s one county.
Randy: Wow!
Ted: There are over 3,000 counties, and half of the counties sell tax lien certificates. The other half of the counties will sell tax deeds. We’ll talk about both. That’s Jacksonville, Florida.
Randy: Well, I will say, I’m seeing a lot of opportunity there though.
Ted: 30,000 certificates. Anybody can make money with a tax certificate. Anybody. Your grandfather. You can tell your grandfather, your grandma. You don’t have to worry about that because with a tax lien certificate, you invest with the government. You get a check back from the government.
Ted (cont’d): You and I are completely out of the deal. I just teach it, and you interview me so that we can teach people, but there’s no way we touch the money. The money is never touched. It goes from the consumer that raises a hand to buy the certificate, directly to the county. So their money is protected by the property tax code of that county. That’s how safe it is. It’s predictable, it’s certain, and secure.
Randy: Well, if I want to take advantage of that, as you just mentioned, there is no central location. Should I start my own county, or do I just bring up a county and I can find some information that way?
Ted: Well, in the good old days, when I started back when I had black hair, like you do, in those days, you just bought in the local county. Now we have the internet. So you can buy in over 1,700 counties in the United States. Half of the United States sells tax lien certificates. The other half of the states sell tax deeds. We can talk about both of them, but all of those 1,700 counties will sell tax liens.
Ted (cont’d): If you want to buy in Mississippi, you can do that. You can buy them in Florida, Tennessee, and Arizona. Each one of those states has their own counties and laws. You can look them up online, and then you can call. Here I’ll show you another one, like I showed you Jacksonville. I’ll get another one here on my desk.
Ted (cont’d): Here’s one from south Florida. This is Broward county. That would be Fort Lauderdale. They have their own little newspaper, and they will have about 40,000 tax certificates. There are no pictures in this.
Randy: That’s why I was going to ask you another question. Let’s say that I’m looking at the Broward county website or the paper, and I’m interested in that property there. How do I know it’s a good location? I’m here in Cleveland, Ohio. How do I make sure that’s a good location and a good deal?
Ted: It’s not complex. It’s easy to do. The counties subscribe to a system that’s called “GIS.”
Randy: GIS?
Ted: Yes, GIS, Geographic Information System. It’s a satellite that’s going around the world, and the county subscribes to that. It’s free. You can go in there and get that satellite, and you can bring it right down to the geranium on the front porch.
Randy: Great.
Ted: It takes that back up again. So you can see the school over here. You can see the neighborhood firehouse over there. You can see uh-oh this doesn’t look like a very good area over here. So you might not want to buy. That’s one of the ways you could look.
Ted (cont’d): Or you could call a broker and tell the broker to go look at it. You could go on to the old fashioned way they did it. Do you remember the old Google maps? They drove down the road, and they had a camera and were taking the pictures.
Randy: Sure.
Ted: Okay, you could do that. There are a lot of ways to look at private property. There’s no privacy anymore. The only thing they don’t do is go into your bathroom and check what kind of bathroom you have. Otherwise, they know everything about you nowadays.
Randy: Well, hey, would you recommend, basically, okay, so on Google Earth it’s like, hey, it looks pretty good. Should I still maybe try and get a local broker down there and say, take a look around? Is that usually good enough? Is a visual going to be good enough to act on?
Ted: Yeah, Google is the easy way to do it. Plus you’re communicating, and we’re used to communicating. You know what will happen. With a tax certificate, you invest with the government, and you get your check back from the government. But what if you don’t get paid?
Ted (cont’d): What if you don’t get a check back? Well, then you get the property. So you should never buy anything unless you know what you’re going to get back. You’re getting my point. You raise your hand and buy a tax certificate, get a $100,000 house for paying a $3,000 tax, and the guy doesn’t come in and pay. Doesn’t redeem. You get the property.
Ted (cont’d): If it’s a decent property, great. But what if it burned down? You don’t want that thing. You don’t even want to bid on that. So you always want to have, what we say, boots on the ground.
Randy: I was going to say the same thing before you did. I think that’s a perfect description of it. You want to make sure somebody’s around to actually take a look at it. Hey Ted, we have your web address here, TedThomas.com, and I’m seeing now we have a “/freegift.” If you go to TedThomas.com/freegift, what’s that “free” about?
Ted: Oh, the free is, if people want to get an auction list, we give them one free list. We’ll actually print a list out and send it to them, like one of these lists. Now, most people print out the tax deed list, which is the properties that are actually going to come up for sale. Not the tax liens, the tax deeds. We have lists of those too that look like this. This is a list that an auctioneer put together, and it even shows the pictures of the properties.
Randy: Oh, that’s nice.
Ted: So, come to our site. We can show you that kind of information. It’s absolutely free. Just one though. We don’t show you the whole country because there are over 3,000 counties, and it would take two weeks to show you all of it.
Randy: So if you head to TedThomas.com/freegift, you’re going to get a free auction list. There’s also an offer to attend a full workshop to get a sense of what’s going on there. Ted Thomas is the authority on all this, and he knows a lot. If you’re not already at the website, go there and get your free auction list. Also, take a look at a bunch of other videos, just like this, where Ted explains a lot about how you can get involved in this and some of the benefits of it. Check it out right now. TedThomas.com/freegift.
Ted Thomas is America’s Leading Authority on Tax Lien Certificates and Tax Deed Auctions, as well as a publisher and author of more than 30 books. His guidebooks on Real Estate have sold in four corners of the world. He has been teaching people just like you for over 30 years how to buy houses in good neighborhoods for pennies on the dollar. He teaches how to create wealth with minimum risk and easy-to-learn methods.
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