Tax Leins

[Mark Gruetzmacher]

Hey everyone, the idea of tax liens have crossed my mind a few time but I wonder if it is even worth the work involved for the returns available.  I have done some checking and the county treasurer told me that there is a 3 yr redemption period so you would have to pay the taxes for the 3 yrs and if they don't get redeemed you can proceed further.  I was also told the interest rate starts at 10% and goes down from there if there are bidders on it.

We only have a tax lien sale once a year also.  They just posted in the paper the properties and then on Monday they have the sale.  Pretty mind boggling looking at 2 pages in the paper with just the legal description and tax amount plus then they have the sale only  five days later.

Is that how it normally works.  Is 10% interest normal as well?  Maybe it is just me but only having 5 days from posting what's going up for bid and the sale date would make for a ton of work to be completed to have an enough time to make an informed decision.  

As it has crossed my mind some I just wanted to check it out.

[Ned Carey]

I wouldn't be surprised if that information was available earlier but you just now found it. I suspect that there was a  much longer list and this is the final list that will actually go into the sale.

In baltimore the original list starts at about 25,000 properties, it get whittled down to about 10,000 by the time the sale comes.  Two pages doesn't seem like much to me. Once you learn how to do the due diligence it will seem a lot less intimidating than it does now.

As a starting interest rate that is fairly low. However good properties in competitive markets are often bid down to much lower than that. Last year in Baltimore the interest started at 18% but the average bid was down to 7%. Some as low as 2%

Your market may not be that competitive. The only way to know is to participate.