Interested to hear if anyone has attempted to contact the property owner of record just prior to a tax deed sale and successfully managed to take title to the property and pay off the tax debt owed prior to the sale. The idea behind this would be to beat the competition and get a good deal on property before it’s bid up at auction.
@masnyder I have done this multiple times o in fact my first two property aquisitions were exactly this. I have seen / heard it called “deed snatching” - i.e. you buy it from the delinquent taxpayer before it goes to auction and “snatch” the deed from the would-be buyers of a tax sale.
In the jurusduction where i have done it most frequently, the county has fairly easy to access court records on-line. I’d look for tax cases and read through the documentation to find the owner name and APN #. Then, I’d use the the count assessor site to look up the property and determine if it was vacant and if so, contact the owner with an offer. For countied where I could not find court case info, then I’d wait until the tax sale notices came out. But, for those - you really have to move fast to lock up the property before the tax sale. I couple times, I had the property under contract and did enough due diligence to be comfortable it would close with a clear title and, I paid the taxes ahead of time to keep it from going to sale. This is very risky and not advisable unless the taxes are small and the reward to risk ratio is high.