Finding lists for land flips

[Eric Gibbs]

Hello all! Beginning a career in RE and I planned on starting with buying and selling vacant land parcels that are delinquent on property taxes. I learned that I could acquire lists from local parish tax assessor or sheriff’s office so I started there. However, I quickly found that property owners only become delinquent after January 1 and the property goes to a tax sale by May 31st of the following year. If you are trying to target those properties that are delinquent but not yet to a tax sale, the window is rather small and the lists could be difficult to acquire as the parishes typically say they source it out to a third party. What am I missing? How is this done in other states (I am in Louisiana). Thank you in advance for any feedback!

[Seth Williams]

Hi @Eric Gibbs - the timing of this depends on the way your state works. I'm not sure how Louisiana works, but in a lot of states, the county will allow taxes to remain delinquent for up to 2 years until they seize them in tax foreclosure (and after that, they'll auction them off to the highest bidder as a way of recouping the delinquent property taxes).

When I'm sending mail to a delinquent tax list, the goal is to obtain the list of delinquent tax property owners sometime AFTER they've become delinquent, but BEFORE the county has seized their property. This allows me to work directly with the property owner to put a deal together, rather than fighting with competition at the county tax sale auction.

I would say your first step is to find out how many years a property can go delinquent in your area before it is seized by the tax collector. This is essentially the window of time you have to work with.

Once you know what your deadline is, you can send out your mail during this timeframe. I'd say in most cases, you shouldn't start the process any more than 3 months before the deadline when the properties are seized by the municipality... preferably longer if you can. Sometimes people move slowly in responding to you, and you don't want to cut it too close, so it's good to give yourself some wiggle room.

If you find that your state simply doesn't allow enough time to put any deals together (and frankly, I'd be surprised if this was actually the case... most states will allow at least 1 year, and usually longer than that), you can look in any of the surrounding states (or honestly, any state in the country, if you're willing to work remotely) to see how their system works.

I hope that helps!