I am currently trying to acquire delinquent tax lists in several Tennessee counties and I am getting a consistent answer. They only offer them in paper and not in digital format. I am interested in trying out PropStream, but looking back through previous posts it seems that some of you have had issues with getting current information. I am not comfortable working out of state on my first deals and want to work in my home state until I have had some success. Any suggestions on what I should do next? Thanks for your help!
@jnalbrycht if delinquent tax data is crucial to you, I would only trust it from the county. Some data services will give you a filtering option for this, but you’ll find it’s either not available at all, or the information is several months old.
As for the counties you’re calling, make sure you’ve talked to the county IT person (don’t just stop with the treasurer’s office). If anyone tells you it’s not possible to get it in digital format (which is ridiculous… how else would they print it off on paper if it didn’t already exist somewhere in digital format?), the IT person will know how it’s done. If that person says “no”, then they’re just being obstinate and you might as well move on.
If every county is still giving you the runaround and refusing to provide it in digital format, you could just scrap the idea and get it from a data service instead (this is what most people eventually end up doing in the end anyway… even if the delinquent tax list does give you a better response rate, it’s can be SUCH a pain to deal with).
PropStream is pretty nice to have for property research and as a “sidearm” set of data to crosscheck anything I might have doubts about in DataTree (also useful for skiptracing when that’s needed), but if I could only use one source of data, I still prefer DataTree, just because of the consistency (I always know which database it’s pulling from) and familiarity I have with it.
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@jnalbrycht I second DataTree. I used to get info directly from the county but 75% of my sellers/respondants weren’t even delinquent on thier taxes. I only found this out b/c sometimes I had no choice but to mail the whole county. Plus these counties can format thier lists weird, making them unusable sometimes. Commit to this land thing and start out right with DT.
@jnalbrycht
Possibly you may want to try this. TN is a tax deed state, they publish the delinquent property list on the county clerk website 30 days prior to the tax sale.
(You may want to send letters to the homeowner at this point before the tax sale.)
As an example, I picked Anderson county. https://andersoncountyclerk.ky.gov/Pages/Delinquent-Taxes.aspx
In the first paragraph it gives you a list of delinquent properties.
However, TN allows homeowners to redeem their property within 1 year after the tax sale. So the homeowner would need to pay the back taxes plus a 10% penalty to redeem their property. (You could also mail to homeowner within this 1 year time frame before they lose their property forever.) .
Possibly you may find some motivated sellers and some good deals.
The following is a link for every county in TN.
https://www.ctas.tennessee.edu/counties
Good luck!!
@retipsterseth Sorry to get back to you so late. I did actually decide to pay for 2 paper lists from two of the counties I live near. Only $9 total. One of them was able to give it to me in pdf format. It’s not a huge amount of parcels. Maybe 400 combined between the two. It may be a pain to put into excel, but I feel like this can be a good start to do my first letter campaign. Depending on how this goes I will try out the clerks website as suggested by Pat below. Thanks again!
@pk Thanks for the advice. I really appreciate it. I purchased a couple of lists directly from the clerks office for two counties. I am going to get them formatted into excel and do my first letter campaign in February. Finally getting the ball rolling. I will definitely look into using the clerks website in the future.