Category: Working the Records

The short answer is “ALL of the counties, ALL of the time”. If you limit yourself to one or two counties, you will quickly become disappointed and here is why:

All counties hold their auctions on different days and different intervals (weekly, monthly, every 2 months, etc). There are typically auctions every Monday through Thursday and occasionally some on Friday (but very few).

We provide surplus for every county that has their auctions online plus about 10 that hold auctions offline (Total of about 37 counties out of 67) and here is a general outlook on how many records we get each week from ALL of those counties combined…

Starting each week, there are about 300-600 tax deeds headed to auctions.

Before an auction even starts, roughly 50% of them get redeemed by the owner (they pay their taxes and save their property from being auctioned).

So then, we watch the auctions that are left to get the ending bid and determine IF there is surplus money left over.

Within those, about 20% receive NO bids and therefore produce no surplus.
10% receive bids but the surplus is not over $1000 so we don’t bother.

That leaves 20% (an average of about 75/week) where:

  1. Auction actually happened AND
  2. Surplus is over $1000 (anything less is really not worth going after)

THOSE go on our Surplus List and this is pretty much the list you could buy anywhere else or that the county will put out themselves months later. It is a bare bones list that is almost useless if you do not know what you are doing.

We then we add the Owner and their mailing address, plus locate and download the Property Information Report for you

You then need to know if there are liens on the property that are so high, it will take all the surplus.

In short, the records get dwindled down so much that you need all you can get your hands on from as many counties as possible, to make an impact and do well in this business.

Trying to stick with just one county will not do you any good.

There is ONE exception to this rule. You can go after the records in counties where they hold their auctions in person and they do not provide their tax deed documents and claim information online. These would be the counties that are the least saturated with asset recovery companies because so much more work is involved and in-person visits to the Clerks office are needed. If you happen to live in or near one of those counties, I would highly recommend you digging in there.

New counties are going online with their auctions all the time. However as of right now (5/2023) here is a list of the in-person auction counties that do not provide their documents online, therefore would be the least saturated by asset recovery companies who do not live near them.

Columbia

DeSoto

Dixie

Franklin

Gadsden

 

Glades

Hamilton

Hardee

Hendry

Holmes

Jefferson

 

Lafayette

Liberty

Madison

Monroe

Nassau

Seminole

Sumter

 

Suwannee

Taylor

Union

Wakulla

 

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