5 Keys To Delinquent Tax Investing

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek. Let's have a virtual cup of coffee together this morning. I am drinking the hard stuff. Just a nice shot of espresso. I love it. I'm nice and wired. So today, or I should say this morning, let's talk about the five most important departments that you need to really understand when you first get started in tax, delinquent investing and buy buying property, pennies on the dollar from individuals. These five county departments you're going to use consistently, especially the first three. The other two, maybe not as much, certainly, but certainly the first three. So the first department you're really going to need to know really well is the county treasurer. Now, your county may have a different name for it, but basically this is the department that collects property taxes. And in my investors toolkit, I'm going to give you the exact letter that I use to contact the county treasurer to get the list of people that owe back taxes in the format that we need to make offers. So you need to get to know the county treasurer really, really well, and that's where you're going to start. The second department is the county assessor. The assessor simply looks at all the sales for that county and comes up with evaluation purposes. I'm sure you've gotten property notice evaluations in the mail for your house or other types of real estate that you've owned. And this is from the county assessor. The assessed value is always a percentage of the market value. It may have nothing to do with actual reality, but that's what the assessor does. But the key thing the assessor also has are typically plat maps. And plat maps are simply those maps that are going to help you locate your property. So when you're doing your research, go to the county assessor and find out if they have the plat map for that subdivision or that area that you're interested in researching. So the county assessor is critical when you're doing your mapping and your research and your evaluations. The third most important county official, if you will, is the county recorder. The recorder records all the legal documents for that property. They're going to record any liens, any IRS liens, any types of encumbrances on that property. And you can really dig deep into the recorder's office and do your own virtual title search. Most recorders today have all this information digitized by Google to make it really easy, but there's still some counties out there that are in the process. So you want to know the Recorder really well, after you sell your property, you're going to record your documents with the county recorder and get to know their fees. So the first three most important counties are going to be your treasurer, your assessor, and your recorder. Now, the fourth department in the county is going to be the the mapping department. If the assessor doesn't have the plat maps or the subdivision maps that you need, the mapping department will. They'll typically charge 5 to $20 for those maps. So that's a department that you want to get to know real well. Get to know as well if the assessor doesn't have what you need. So your fourth department is mapping. And then finally the fifth department, planning and zoning. If you buy property out in the city, you want to know what it's zoned correct. Residential, commercial. If it's in the city, it's not going to be agricultural, but if you're buying on the outskirts, it could be zoned agricultural. You want to know these things. You want to know exactly what you can and can't do on that property. And the planning and zoning department will have all those answers for you. And if you want to convert that property into a higher and better use. So for example, the property is used agriculturally now, but you want to turn it into a residential lot. Planning and zoning will walk you through the steps needed to file those permits to change the zoning regulation. So this is a little bit more comprehensive than our typical coffee talks, but I hope you found it useful. If you want to learn more tips, tricks, techniques on how to buy and sell land for an amazing income, go to the landgeek.com download for free, the passive Income Blueprint. And certainly you can register as well. You'll get the three fatal land buying mistakes and get each week delivered to your email. The Land Geek Podcast. So this is Mark Podolski. Thanks for having a virtual cup of coffee with me. I'll see you next time.