All Forum Posts by: Account Closed

I would like to have a conversation with a Tax Sale Investor who has experience with working Florida Delinquent Property Rolls to solicit buying tax delinquent property from the tax delinquent owner, before it goes to auction.

Florida being a Tax Lien state sells tax lien certificates to investors. After 2 years, if the delinquent owner has not "redeemed" the tax lien, the tax lien holder can apply for a tax deed. If approved, the county I am working in at least, sets a date for the auction of the delinquent owner's property. If no one else bids on the property, the tax lien holder who filed TDA (TAX DEED APPLICATION) can pay sufficient funds to the county to pay off any additional tax lien certificates and be given a Tax Sale Deed which will make them the owner of the property.

The county has multiple "status" designations that a delinquent account may be classified as. The primary ones that I had an interest in was OPEN (which means a tax lien certificate has been issued and the taxes, though paid by the 3rd party tax lien investor, are still due and owing in relation to the delinquent account's status with the county). Hence, these are prospects that I can approach to see if they are willing to sell their property to me, before any further action is taken by the county to sell their property at a tax deed sale. However, there can be a significant delay between when an account becomes delinquent and when it might end up being sold at a tax deed sale, if the 3rd party investor tax lien holders are not interested in pushing forward to acquire the property, instead of just waiting to get their interest and principal back at some future date.

If the status has changed to TDA from OPEN, how much time do I have to purchase the property from the owner before the Tax Deed Sale auction, which will extinguish my opportunity to buy directly from the delinquent property owner. Is approaching those accounts that are listed as TDA a good strategy to find "motivated sellers" for tax delinquent property in Florida. It seems that any property that has a TDA filed, would indicate that the property is valuable or the tax lien investor would not have taken that action to hopefully acquire the property that they are indirectly in control of via their tax lien certificate from the county & the delinquent taxpayer would know they have a deadline to act after which they will lose the property entirely to whoever wins the auction bid. I would prefer to ONLY mail to those accounts that have the greatest prospect of giving me a return on my marketing dollar. Would you please comment on if acting on TDA's is too late to be successful in my objectives of buying and reselling the property prior to the tax deed auction? Thank you for any help!

Our contract is only slightly over a month old. It was written to be contingent on us being able to acquire an end buyer for the property. Our earnest money deposit is very nominal, so we are not at risk there, even if we should lose that. Opportunity to sell the property will be lost, if we fail to produce a buyer by scheduled closing date. That is our only liability. We have a broad inspection and approval contingency that could be applied that the property failed to meet our investing criteria, so we are not particularly worried about getting out of the contract. We are only troubled by how to get our phone to ring with interested parties who wish to buy this property, within our opportunity period.

Thank you Bill. Even though I am new as a pro member, I have seen your comments on several forums over the last two years and I appreciate your stature in the Bigger Pockets community.

The property isn't leased, it is under contract to buy and has provision for immediate resale rights. We do primarily wholesale deals, but this one, being in such excellent condition, we felt we should try to do an outright sale to a retail buyer or to a buy and hold investor for close to market value. My strategy is to do a simultaneous close with an end buyer by October 14, 2016. Even though the property is in foreclosure, in Florida with it's Judicial process taking a minimum of 6 months and then often it taking up to 4 months to get scheduled for a lender sale to the public after judgment is issued...the seller was not under significant pressure to sell for what was owed to keep a foreclosure off their record. The sold comps in the area have been as high as $260, so it appeared there was significant margin for me to share some equity dollars with the seller, which is included in the purchase and sale agreement. If it wasn't for that promise to pay the seller $14K over and above what is owed, it would be easy for me to offer this excellent condition property to a landlord buyer for 80% of current market value with renter in place and still make a reasonable wholesaler flipping margin (or assignment fee if they just purchase my contract.)

However, with 5 Craigslist ads per day, MLS listing and presence on Realtor.com and Zillow.com as a FSBO not getting my phone to ring in over 1 month of advertising, I'm pretty discouraged by the last of interest. If just lowering the price is the only real obstacle to getting the phone to ring, it appears that I should go to just above my "no profit" rock bottom price immediately or simply turn it over to an aggressive local real estate agent instead of investing a couple thousand in direct mail campaigns to either the local household community or cash buyer investors who have purchased more than two properties in the immediate zip code. As that money may be lost as well as the potential to profit from the deal if no buyer can be produced by our closing date. The seller is not interested in extending the closing date in our agreement, if we do not close by the agreed date originally placed in that agreement at the seller's request. Even though they calculated that they could make more by listing it with a realtor instead of going with us, since we held out an option that they could stay in the home as renter's if our end-buyer was a buy and hold investor and appreciated having a turnkey rental situation at closing, that caused them to give us the deal.

        However, if we can't deliver on our promise, they would prefer to take back control of the property, if we haven't been able to produce what we promised in the 2 month's we will have had the opportunity to buy and sell this house.

If we list with the interested real estate agent, he may profit from his investment of time and expertise, even if he does not have time to sell it for us, by simply negotiating with the current owner/seller as soon as we are out of the picture; if our contract expires. 

If we do not invest much more than we have in marketing, we will not have lost too much in losing this deal, due to our inexperience in selling properties. But we had anticipated achieving more than a realtor's commission in flipping this deal. Now we are thinking we might be happy with only 6%, if we could even make that happen. LOL!

Thank you one and all for your perspective and advice. I am so delighted to here from experienced investors who are even from this area. I appreciated those parties that gave me some numbers to work with, and I also appreciated the general council that direct marketing this property to cash buyer investors via direct mail, is unlikely to produce good results.

I have a local real estate agent who has been VERY interested in marketing the property, who is allegedly a top seller in his organization with Keller Williams Realty. It sounds like that may be my best approach, given the short time frame needed before my contract with my seller expires.

Please know that every one of you gave me some valuable input and I appreciate you taking the time to educate me. I am familiar with Lehigh Acres reputation in general, but since the property is actually inside Fort Myers city limits, it and the surrounding gated communities seem to be enjoying greater interest, prices and rents than are typical to Lehigh Acres. For some strange reason is still has a Lehigh Acres mailing address, but the HOA of Sherwood at the Crossroads clearly states it is within the city limits of Fort Myers and enjoys all that city's infrastructure services.

If I do a full 20-25% discount, I would make nothing on the deal, which means I paid too much for it to sell it to a buy and hold investor, apparently. So, marketing to a retail buyer may be the only viable option...which as mentioned might best be done via an experienced and high performing real estate agent.

Does anyone wish to comment on the idea of having a private auction, where you do newspaper and flyer marketing, canvasing the area immediate to the property and then having a 2 hour Sunday open house with a round robin phone auction the evening after the open house to any bidders who attended the open house, to get the house sold immediately?

I have a residential property that I am flipping in Fort Myers FL 33971 area. It has double digit appreciation and is located in a popular community that has rents that have nearly doubled within the last year or so...now up to 1600-1800/mo rent.

I have been marketing with several Craigslist postings/day primarily and now am beginning to send postcards to Cash Buyers in my zip code area. I have listed it with a Flat-Fee MLS listing broker to the local MLS area agents. I have a sign posted in the yard with a 24 hr message & live answer phone number in place. I got it under contract on or about August 17, 2016 and have only received two interested party phone calls. One was an investor and one was a real estate agent wanting to list the property. The investor scheduled an appointment to see the property and then never showed up.

Current Market Value is arguably $268K for a 4BR/3BA SFR in this community. I dropped the price $18K from that to $249,999.00 a week ago and still the phone is not ringing. How much of a discount from the fair market value needs to be in place for a buy & hold investor to be interested in this property? Property is in excellent condition, as it was warranty renovated this year (originally built in 2005), and there is a renter already in place...so it can be a turnkey rental for an interested landlord.

    I would like feedback from experienced landlords on Bigger Pockets who may or may not own property in the SWF Lee County Florida area, as to whether I need to aggressively lower the price, or do I need to somehow acquire greater exposure (other than Craigslist ads & direct mail postcards) to get this property sold. I have deadline of needing to sell it within 2-3 weeks from now. I lost a prior deal when I tried to hold out for a larger wholesale margin, when I could have made a marginal profit...so I'm afraid to not drop the price quickly but don't know if I should do many small incremental drops or just do some large drops to get it into an investor appetite range.

       Here's two links if you wish to have more details on this deal. 1) is a proforma presentation if the investor purchased it for about 10% below market value with photos of active for sale comps and 10 sold comps for this property. 2) is my basic investor Craigslist ad for a Turnkey Investment Property with 24 photos on the property and greater verbal detail in the ad.

Here's a copy of what I put on my marketing postcard:

**IN DEMAND TURNKEY RENTAL**

To View Sold & Active Comps:

CLICK HERE

To View Property Details & 24 photos:

CLICK HERE

CALL US TODAY: xxx.xxx.xxxx

     I am brand new to the Pro membership with Bigger Pockets, so am hoping that some of you will consider giving me your counsel on how to get my house sold to an investor.  I would prefer to be able to leave the previous owner in place as a renter, rather than selling to a retail buyer who would want to live in the home themselves. Am considering listing the property with an aggressive real estate agent who has been pursuing me to let them work the deal asap, but reluctant to have my hands tied to market the property myself...at least to the investor community of buyers. Thanks for reading my long post and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

RC  

If some experienced tax defaulted property investor would consider providing me some of their tricks of the trade, I would like some help knowing how best to sort and filter the tax defaulted properties from county tax agencies. And more specifically Florida counties.

Florida is a tax lien state, which means several years can pass by before the county may offer the property for sale to a potential buyer. How to know what strategy to apply to be most efficient at contacting tax delinquent owners who truly have no desire to keep their properties and who have property that does have value exceeding the tax liability. Should I approach owners who will at the last minute pay their liens and penalties (possibly those with liens younger than 2 years) or avoid this potential waste on direct mail costs? Should I look for properties that have low interest rates on their liens, since obviously their property must have held good value for the investors who bought those liens were willing to receive so little return on their investment, unless they saw a chance to own the property after a couple years. Do I have to look at each property individually to know the value of the property, outside the assessed value given it by the county. Will all delinquent property over 4-5 years old all be simply vacant land?

My current plan is to connect with a motivated delinquent property owner who will accept a small payment to sign their property over to me and then market the property for a discount below current market value or allow the county to sell the property and collect the excess proceeds. I understand the basics. It's just that a 10,000-20,000 item list from the county is so intimidating when I only want to mail to the 500-1000 best prospects to benefit from my investing strategy. Will people who live in the property (homestead properties) be a poor bet that they will allow it to be lost at the county tax sale? Are properties that are scheduled to be sold shortly at an upcoming tax sale, better to focus on, even though I have very limited time in which to make an effective direct mail response connection? Any input would be appreciated if you have experience in this arena.