How I Mine For Gold In Real Estate Tax S...

Hey Moguls, Corey Taylor here…

Before we jump into today’s great lesson, I wanna do a quick, helpful recap of some useful info...

Counties all over the country need to sell properties or liens on property in order to collect their tax dollars. Deceased owners can’t pay, heirs often don’t want to pay and sometimes people lose jobs or for whatever reason get behind on their payments and are just unable to pay their property taxes.

These lists of taxes owed are published by the county as a matter of public record. These “Tax Sale Lists” contain GOLD because the county Treasurer is telling you outright who has a distressed seller situation on a property by publishing a list of owners behind on taxes.

The problem most people face investing in tax sales is that these initial published lists of tax delinquent properties (“tax lists”) don’t contain enough information to make an investment decision. The lists often contain only parcel number, owner name, taxes owed, sale date, maybe a legal description and sometimes a partial address.

Not much to work with.

Given this hurdle and the lazy nature of most investors, they stop here and don’t pursue these opportunities for cheap deals. But not you! You recognize the fact that “entry barriers,” even simple ones like I just described, are where professional investors separate themselves from perpetual amateurs.

It’s low hanging fruit, you just need a step stool to get it, and most won’t walk a few steps back to the truck to get the step stool even if it means a lot more fruit in the basket. Most people (not you) will simply keep walking to the next tree with nothing in their basket because they’re into the myth that fruit will simply fall off the tree.

But I digress…

So I have this list of people who have property that is in some financial trouble. It might be a list of 100 properties or a list of 10,000...

I don’t yet know what kind of properties they are. Which ones are a sliver of land near the highway exit? Which ones are buildable lots? Which ones are houses I want to own long term?

I need to convert this list given by the Treasurer into an “investable list” with all the information I need to know what I’m looking at. How do we know how many are worth our time?

This requires enhancing and expanding the tax delinquent list with additional data from the county record. Lot size, house size, market value, assessed value, bedrooms, baths, taxes owed, maybe a GIS image, etc.

Once you have this information you can filter and sort (in Excel) the property types you want to the top of the list and decide if there is anything on it you want to buy.

late The two main ways to get this done were to either hire some virtual labor to work for days looking up each property on the county website one by one, which would take forever on long lists, or buy a list from a source that sells lists where they used software to get the data from the county...

These lists are usually expensive and “age” quickly; meaning as people pay their taxes your enhanced list gets more inaccurate. You might be working on a property only to find out when you want to buy it that the taxes were already brought current.

Let’s agree this work to get a tax list ready to invest is largely administrative. I don’t like administrative work, I like investment work. We needed a cheaper, faster way to get this admin task done so we created a fantastic tool that gives us a significant edge in the marketplace.

My solution

The solution to this problem for our company and our students is software that we created to get county data into any tax list we choose almost instantly. We call her the Automated Research Assistant (ARA).

She’s great because she is always at work, she’s consistent, she’s fast and she’s cheap. What better worker could you ask for, right? Now we never have an aged list, we don’t pay for lists and we get the lists enhanced in minutes or hours, not days.

So here is the bottom line. Our “mining” process is simply this:

Get the county tax list of choice
Use a VA or load list into a program and get the data
Filter list (in Excel) down to desirable properties
Get more value and repair research for desirable properties (ARA helps with this, too)
Buy Liens of Deeds and make a ton of money

The faster we put lists into our program, the faster the gold comes out.

You can do 5 steps right? The only thing that takes some practice is knowing when the research is telling you ‘Yes to buy it’ or ‘No don’t buy it.’ That’s investing!

Wouldn’t it be nice to be spending most of your time on the investing tasks and not the other tasks that are costly, distracting and don’t make you money?

Let’s talk lists

You might be thinking, okay that’s great, but what kind of tax lists?

The answer to that is a bit more complicated, but you can do lists of properties going to the live Lien or Deed Auction, or it can be lists of liens or deeds available after the auction, or it can be a list of properties liened last year and almost at the end of redemption, etc.

And, with help from our data program, she retrieves as much county information as they have and brings it down neatly into a spreadsheet so we can sort out the good properties.

At this point you should be realizing we like tax sales because it’s a constant source of motivated sellers and opportunities for high earnings, and with this ARA we can mine the gold from lists very quickly.

This combination of strategy and software quickly gets you beyond a lead-flow problem and into the funding problem, which is where we all want to be. More properties (or liens) than you can buy!

Like the goods you got here? Hope so… there’s more where that came from; check out my first Mogul lesson and my killer live training call.

Corey Taylor