Technically, you weren't buying from the government per se, but rather the local county tax collector.

I thought I'd be opening a pandora's box.I must say, though, a recent news story on NBC about a garden at the white house, and the boom on growing your own;http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/#29803183and noting that there hasn't been a garden at the white house since the "victory garden" of WWII, does make one stop and wonder.Ralph

These are properties that were 150k+ at the height of the boom so it's pretty amazing.

Prices have dipped, it's definitely a buyer's market, and properties stay on the market for substantially longer than they once did here, but for the most part you didn't see the complete bottoming-out that other cities struggled with (and during the boom you didn't see exploding prices, either).

Only the West side (Anglophone side of Montreal) is experiencing the major boom.

The US Economy is still booming with no sign of stopping yet. some A type buildings are slowing down because of over supply issues in some markets. 

Denton, Krum, Ponder, Sanger, Decatur will boom when that shift happens. 

The next deal you might buy 3 sight unseen condos and it goes BOOM.   

But echoing what everyone else has said, get out there, meet some people, look for deals, do grunt work, and one day you'll come across a deal good enough and take it to one of your investors and ask for a piece of it maybe 5 or 10 percent as a fee and BOOM, you're on your way.Or of course you could get a job and save $136/month for 12 years to buy one house.

The issue is it's going to add up because you're not going to win a lot of the auctions, especially if the reserve bids aren't announced in advance.For the taxes, obviously you go to the tax collector's website / call their office.