Looking at your competition's playbook in online tax lien auctions

Getting ready for the 2017 Arizona tax lien auctions. I found that RealAuctions, the company that provides the online software for several counties in Arizona and across the country, has added new data to their results.

I've written on my blog about how I use the bid data from past auctions to help me form a bid strategy for upcoming tax lien auctions. RealAuctions shows the results after the auction is over and gives the bid distribution for each lien. They don't show what each bidder bid, but they do show a count of how many people bid at each interest rate for each lien.

This year RealAuction has added a Bid History in the previous year results. The Bid History shows by bidder number what each person/entity bid for each lien. This information tells me exactly what my competition did.

Grant Street Auctions is the other major software provider for online auctions to counties. They have provided the bids by bidders for years. I haven't bid in those counties but I'm familiar with their system and always hoped RealAuctions would add the data. Now they did and RealAuctions added it online for the last three years of auction results.

I have a freelance outsourcer who grabs data for me and puts it into spreadsheets so I can filter and manipulate it to determine my strategies. I recently completed Pinal county in Arizona as the first county with the Bid History data. I just created a video showing what the data is and my initial reactions on how it can be used to gain insight into how the competition has bid in the past. You can see if they are consistent in bid amounts, types of underlying property, etc.

You can watch the video through this link: on YouTube