Delinquent Tax Sale 12/10/19 in Spartanburg, SC

[Camille K.]

This will be my first tax lien auction ever.  Anyone ever attend one of these in Spartanburg, SC?  

Are bidders of this location predominantly looking for the interest return or to acquire property not redeemed?  

Is this area known for competition to purposely bid up the price?  What are the increments of the bidding?

Also, this county requires bidder to pay by cash, cashier's check, certified check or money order by end of the sale.  I'm not a cash-carrying bidder; therefore, how to prepare ahead of time with the other methods of payment if no exact amount is known escapes me. If I'm not the highest bidder and no transaction takes place can a certified check be reversed by the bank?  What do other bidders do?

Last big question, how to know if the property owner paid the taxes before the auction; don't want to waste my time with all of the above and find out my interests have been eliminated!

Thank you to anyone who cares to share.  Happy Thanksgiving Holiday to all.

[Kevin Nichols]

Hi:

I live in Rock Hill, SC and have attended a few of the York County tax sales.  This is my method of operations:

1.) A few weeks before the sale, the county puts out a list in PDF format.  It sucks because in the coming weeks, property owners will pay off their taxes and all the properties you are salivating over will not be available...so don't even look at that list.  :) 

2.) A few days before the tax sale, the final list comes out in PDF format.  This is the list to look at.

3.) I downloaded 118,000 tax parcels from the county website in a data dump, in ShapeFile format and opened in QGIS software, a freeware GIS software you can get online.  The tax IDs were in the data, but not the longitude/latitude.  So when I opened the 118,000 parcels in QGIS, I used geospatial tools to get the centroids (center of each parcel) and then used long/lat plugin in QGIS and converted each centroid to a longititude/latitude coordinate set.

4.) I then took the tax sale PDF from the county and copied it and moved it into an Excel spreadsheet.

5.) I then took the 118,000 ALL parcels in the county data and exported it out into an Excel file also.

6.) I made 2 sheets in one Excel file:  One sheet is "All" and the other sheet is "tax sale" . I then made a "Final" sheet.

7.) I cross referenced the tax sale sheet with the All sheet and that gave me the long/latitude data for each available tax sale property.  

8.) So..."finally," I had a clean list of the tax sale properties with long/lat data.  

9.) I then opened Google maps and created a private Google map of each available parcel.  

I used that map to find properties I wanted and also took my laptop, extension cord, etc. to the sale and would pull open the map and see each property as it was auctioned off.

The auctions are fast...you have to be prepared to bid fast.

York County takes business checks also...so I was able to pay for the liens with my business checks.

Here is my final map:  

https://drive.google.com/open?...

Maybe this helps...maybe not.

Thx,

Kevin