Tax Liens Property Research

[Carla Carvalho]

Hello and thanks in advance for any insight!

I have been doing superficial research on Tax Liens for a while now, and I'm ready to take the plunge in 2015 with a small amount of "test" or "play" money...maybe $1000. I have some real estate investor experience, and I'm a licensed RE agent as a complement to my other career.

 I've read nearly all the posts on this website and am particularly grateful for the insightful and very analytical posts by seasoned investors. Reading about "web scraping software" and all those excel spreadsheets has definitely been fair warning: this is serious business. I get it. However, despite a basic understanding of the concept, I feel like I need a better road map on how and where to start the research in each county. I'm not as worried about figuring out how county's rules, more about analyzing each property individually; how to figure out where to go for important property data. 

Could anyone lay out a basic flow chart of how to analyze the property once a property is identified? i.e., tax assessor's office, drive-by, investigation of environmental concerns. What else are the key elements of analysis?

I am looking at Arizona, maybe eventually Florida...

Finally (and separately) Can anyone comment on experience on California's tax DEEDs? I live in California, so working locally makes sense, but I know this is a completely different process than tax liens. No one seems to write about tax deeds, so should I bother taking the time to learn/invest? 

Thanks much...looking forward to lots of research soon....