Psychology of Tax Delinquent Property owners

When someone decides to stop making their property tax payments and let their property go for taxes, there are many reasons for this.

But below these superficial reasons is a feeling of the owner that he/she just does not want to deal with this property anymore.

Reality does really not play a big role in the minds of these owners. In their minds they just wrote this property off and do not want to deal with it anymore.

They fully know that they could sell the property fast if they would only sell it at a discount and advertise it a little bit, but even that is too much effort for them. And it doesn’t even matter if they could recover thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars from such a sale. Once their mind is made up that they don’t want the property anymore they rarely sway from their position.

This is GREAT for you because you as an investor learning from people like me how to find these people and buy their properties for as little as $100 to $500 can make a fortune with these properties. And you are not even taking advantage of the sellers.

In many of my deals I have actually told the seller that I will re-sell the property down the road for a good profit and they have congratulated me to this and wished me luck.

So buying Tax Delinquent properties directly from the owners for purposes of reselling them is not something you have to hide from your sellers but instead something you can be upfront about.

The reasons a property owner ultimately gets to the point of deciding to let a property go for taxes are multi-fold, but many of them are centered around the following scenarios.

1. A Property owner tried selling their property in a bad market many years ago using an even worse Real Estate Agent. The property did not sell and now they think it cannot be sold.
2. The Owner tried in the past to sell the property for CASH ONLY, no financing. Since obtaining Bank financing on raw, vacant land is more challenging than on houses, this diminishes the pool of available buyers drastically. Most people don’t have $5,000, $10,000 or $20,000 sitting in their bank accounts ready to be used to buy a piece of land. Since this did not lead to success they now are not willing to try it again, or don’t even know that they could sell the piece of land fast with seller financing.
3. The owner is an absentee owner who was for many years hoping for some development to spring up in the property area. If this did not happen, he looses faith in his investment and decides to cut his losses. However, what these owners do not realize is that today we live in the age of the Internet and the entire world is their market. This was not the case to that degree even 10 years ago and not at all 15-20 years ago. As a result, one person’s junk is another person’s treasure. There is Vast numbers of people all over the US looking for any type of real estate at any given time. It is just a matter of you being able to put it online (I can help) and expose this piece of land to the most people possible. With that you should be able to sell any piece of real estate fast and for good $$$.