tax deed resources for Harris County TX. ENJOY!!!

[txrigdiver]

Here is a link to a company that has people stationed at the court house. These people record everything that's posted and every night they fill it in to their web site. www.foreclosehouston.com I used this list extensively when I did tax deed foreclosures and it was well worth every penny I paid. What you are looking for after you open this main page is on the left hand column under ForeclosureSales Type, and it's the "constables sales"
(I COULDN'T UPLOAD THE EXCEL FILE, ANYONE THAT WANTS IT LET ME KNOW AND I'LL EITHER FIND A WAY TO UPLOAD IT OR I'LL E-MAIL IT YOU)
Here is a serious freebie, I've attached a copy of the copyrighted spreadsheet I created and used to analyze tax sale properties to this post. The cells with blue text are all internet links supplying info for each specific peice of property, the links alone here are a gold mine. This spreadsheet is filled out with data on the properties I had targeted at the very last auction I attended, from which I was the winner on three properties (the ones that are highlighted in yellow). All in all, I went to this sale with 1.1 million dollars sent to me by different investors bidding on their behalf. The spreadsheet has two pages. The first page contains a lot of data about the property, the lawsuit, the plaintiff and the taxing authority filing the tax suit, and at the end is financial data that is crunched and imported from the second page of the spreadsheet. The second page of the spreadsheet focuses on holding costs, redemption periods, and ROI based on assumptions. It would take me and my wife working together almost 40 hours to compile this list and drive out to each property and photograph them. We did it month after month after month. If you are familiar with excel you can go in and manipulate these formulas to create your very own personalized analysis tool, also in some of the cells there is a small red triangle in the upper right hand corner, these are notes, read all of those too. If you notice, one of those houses is listed as Nova Dr. here in Houston, I also have that same property listed for sale on this MB in the appropriate area. I used this same exact spreadsheet over the course of 17 months to purchase 18 tax deed properties here in Houston worth a retail value of over 1.49 million dollars and I only spent $724200 of my investors money. One thing to keep in mind, This spreadsheet is only showing the 18 final properties I was going after for the month of March, it doesn't include the other 40 properties we photographed and crunched the data on and then eliminated or the other 2482 properties I eliminated from the bid process for one reason or another. There is a tax sale in every county of Texas every single month. Here in Harris county thpically there are initially anywhere from 2000 to 4000 properties going to auction every month.
I couldn't imagine a more competitive market, there were always 10 to 12 or more simultaneous auctions going on, 8 different constables precincts and anywhere from 2 to 20 trustee sales selling mortgage foreclosure properties. Each individual auction will have anywhere from 200 to 500 people bidding on either target properties or every property that came up. After I filled out this spreadsheet I would send it out to literally hundreds of investors who would sift through it and then send me money to bid on their behalf. It was fun but I have a list of reasons just as long as this as to why I don't do tax deed sales anymore.

[Dan Auito]

Man Don! That's a spicey meataball. :SM131: And what a generous helping indeed. I need some insider secrets like this for Florida. What a leg up on the competition you have given your Texas investor pals here! I'm going to have to start giving out awards if people start posting up this kind of valuable information. Thank you for such a POWER PACKED post to and for our members here! WOW :clap:

[cfc]

Don,

Great information! :SM049: It would probably take someone like me years to figure out all the stuff you put together and are giving out for free! I know I chatted with you before, but for the benefit of everyone else, can you tell us why you don't do tax deed sales any more? I've only done rehabs myself, and I thought about tax deeds, but the rehabs are keeping me busy.

Thx,
Joe

Joe, Dan here stepping into your post, here are a couple quick places to find more info on tax liens and deeds:
www.tax-lien-certificates.net/forum/default.asp (tax lien investors’ forum)
www.tlcinvesting.com (More tax lien info)

[txrigdiver]

The three biggest reasons. But first the disclaimer, thousands and thousands of people make very good money buying and selling tax deeds and liens. I do believe that it is a very good way to acquire property and I will most likely participate at tax deed sales in the future when I have my own money to work with.
1) I was in an investment club comprised of others like me who had taken a gurus course and matched people who did research with people who had money to invest. I did research, many of these people with money bought into the gurus hype hook line and sinker. When the reality sank in that you really can't get premium property for 25 cents on the dollar they settled for the 60 to 70 cents on the dollar but it wasn't the gurus fault it didn't work it was my fault. On top of that when you had to invest another 15 to 30K to get the property up to a level it would actually sell and now you were only getting a 15 to 25% ROI that you had to split with the researcher a lot of investors became dissillusioned. The ones that stuck with it, I was able to make a pretty good return for them for the most part but the turn around time because of exemption periods chased almost everyone else away. The only exit strategy 80% would even think about was a very quick sale so they could move on and re-invest.
2) Any deed you purchase will have either a 6 month or a 2 year redemption period. There are ways around the exemption period but they require the cooperation of the previous homeowner who is pretty bitter about just losing their house to the government. If the home owner wants to redeem the property they have to step up and pay you not only what the winning bid was but an additional 25%, this is for a property with a 6 month redemption period or a property with a 2 year redemption period as long as it's within the first year. A property owner with a 2 year redemption period can get the property back in the second year by paying the winning bid and plus an additional 50%. You can sell the property before the redemption period but the purchaser has to understand the house could possibly be redeemed and because of this there is no title insurance and a very large risk. After the exemption period expires the winning bidder can sell the house but there isn't a title company I've been able to find in the entire state that will issue title insurance for typically a time period equal to 2 to 3 times the original exemption period. I've found one company in Houston that will do some deals on a case by case basis after a period of time equal to 2x the exemption period has expired. That means that if you pay cash for a property that has a homestead exemption there is not a title company that would issue title insurance for 4 years. The great thing about real estate is their ways around everything and you do have some options, but an outright sale is not one of them. I've hired some out of state companies to do what is known basically as a quiet title but even then it takes up to 2 years to do and costs thousands and thousands of dollars and then there is no guarantee that they will be successful. I was unsuccessful both times I tried it and was out thousands of dollars for my effort.

3) It's very difficult to inspect the properties. In a typical month after going through the lists we would narrow our targeted properties down to between 80 to 120 properties. These properties each required a new level of due diligence plus we had to visit the properties and photograph them. Harris county in land mass size isn't the largest county in America but by population it is the 4th largest. Typically it would take us around 20 to 30 hours of windshield time and up to about 400 miles to visit each one of the properties and take the photographs. Those photographs are really the only means of inspecting the property that you have. I bought a very good digital camera with a 10x optical zoom and a 4x digital zoom so I could really zoom in from the front seat of my truck and look for any kind of exterior damage. It's been my experience that these people are very uncooperative. After knocking on doors early on and asking if I could look around the house and then having to explain why, (as if they didn't know) and telling them I was interested in bidding on their house, it proved very confrontational. One time while my wife was with me (navigating) I pulled up to house and started taking pictures the owner burst out his front door with pistol in hand pointed right at me screaming and yelling at me. Another incident was when my wife was by herself taking photographs, the home owner got in their van and started chasing her in what ended up being a 20 mile chase down the freeway with her on the cell phone yelling at me. The money's no good if you aren't around to enjoy it's benefits. The point being is that unless the house is obviously vacant then you don't really get an opportunity to do any kind of inspection unless you go knock on the door and explain yourself. Now I may be wrong, there may be someone out there who has figured a way around this, I didn't. OK now from our original list of 120 properties we needed to visit, after looking at these properties we would eliminate about 60% for various reasons, Now we are left with 48 house we want to bid on and that is a high number. Typically after looking at the house there were around 20 to 25 we would actually be going after but some months there were more then 80. The day of the auction we show up, register and wait for 8 separate constables to show up. Some would have lists of properties they were selling some wouldn't. We would compare our targeted list with the sales list to find out how many had cancelled. For one reason or another the majority of properties would have their sales cancelled. Those that didn't put up lists, we would wait through the entire auction only to find out all the properties we were interested in were cancelled. In spite of this I still managed to purchase 18 properties, 6 are under rental that I manage to this day and almost all the other ones have been rehabbed and sold. Because we couldn't do an inspection before the sale it was quite surprising and disappointing to walk into a house that was beautiful on the outside and find literally tens of thousands of dollars of damage on the inside. And it happened again and again.
As long as this post is I've really just scratched the surface

[belinda]

Don't forget that one of the best sources for foreclosers is your local county. mine is http://www.brazoriacad.org

The above site should have links to counties throughout the state. Most counties have periodic tax sales.

[txrigdiver]

Hey Belinda. tell me how you use your local appraisal district, I'd be curious to know what kind of information your able to glean from their public records.
Thank You!