Introductions

[Jason Dugan]

Hello all, I'm glad I found this site. I am planning on starting real estate investing in the new year and am trying to narrow down a niche.

I currently have a good job, good savings and good credit, so I feel like the timing is right for me to jump in.

I have thought about going into the basic single-family rental market as the home prices where I am (San Antonio, TX area) are reasonable, and the rental market is busy. If I went this route, I would want to move up to multi-family and eventually to apartments.

What really gets me going is this idea of buying the leftovers from tax sale auctions. The only information I can find on this is from sites that want to sell me a $1500 course. I would rather save my money.

Are there really properties that the county has foreclosed on and are willing to sell at a discount? Is it as simple as asking my county treasurer for a list?

Also, as a bonus question, how do you find out exactly where a property is if all you have is a legal description?

Thanks for the good info, and I'm sorry if these are basic questions or have already been addressed.

Jason

[Kathy Mohr]

Hi, Jason:  welcome to BP!  I'm a newbie with no actual buying or selling experience yet.  Taking my time learning.  There are others here who I'm sure can tell you a quicker way to get property address, but I can tell you that I recently researched a subdivision here in Houston and eventually got all the owners names and addresses as well as legal description by flipping back and forth between the harris county Tax assessors site, Harris County Appraisal District ...and possibly Houston area realtors...not sure if you have a comparable realtor's site in San Antonio.  HAR is pretty much top of the line, as I understand it for local realtor organization sites.   But I'd say you need at least the name of the subdivision.  Then you can either drive through or look at a map at it on the realtor's site and get the street names.  With that you can probably do a 'contains' search on your appraisal district or county clerk site.  Pick one of the streets in the subdivision, for example, and search for 'contains' 'XYZ Street.'  Now you should be able to get all the homes/land on that street, and the legal description.  You can derive what each subsequent one is in the subdivision once you see the pattern of how it was laid out and in no time should be able to zero in on the one(s) you've seen as owing back taxes.

Hope that helps in the event you don't get better feedback from  more experienced users!