Unable to physically attend a tax deed or tax sale auction that doesn’t offer absentee bidding? Consider hiring an agent to bid on your behalf! Watch this video to learn more details!

Transcript:

Hi folks! Casey Denman here with TaxSaleAcademy.com. In this video, we’re talking about hiring an agent to bid on your behalf at tax sale auctions.

Now picture this. A tax sale is coming up and you know you’ll be able to make lots and lots of money there. It’s a particular auction that just has a load of great properties and nobody ever seems to show up. There’s one problem – no absentee bidding is allowed. You must be there in person, but you can’t. Say you have a vacation scheduled for out of the country somewhere. Say you’re getting married. You don’t want to miss your wedding, obviously. Say you just don’t have time. Say there’s a lot of things going on in your life and you just aren’t able to make it.

So what do you do? Do you just miss out on all these money that you can potentially make at this auction? No. Of course not. You got to think creative here. You need to hire someone to bid on your behalf.

Now, what happens here is that you do everything you normally would do. You focus on the research side of it. You determine how much to bid on these properties, how much these properties are worth. You have to really focus and really just pinpoint and have laser focus and make sure all your research is absolutely perfect, just like you normally would. The only difference here is that you hire somebody to take your place at the auction. Instead of you going and raising the bidder number and bidding on properties based on your spreadsheet that you have with all your bid amounts, somebody else will do this for you.

Now, there’s a few things that you should be made aware of or things that you need to do. The first one is make sure that the auction allows this. Just about every auction will allow a representative to bid on your behalf. There are still some auctions that don’t allow any representatives. They say you must be there in person. But the majority will allow either an agent or a representative to bid on your behalf.

Now, they can vary as far as the rules. Sometimes, the auction company will hold that person responsible financially and legally responsible for consummating the purchase. Now, obviously, when it comes to that, they have to be somewhat trusting with you as well. And a lot of times, you’re going to have to give them money in advance. So what you need to do is you need to hire somebody that you can trust. That’s thing number 2 you need to do. So hire somebody that you can trust and that you’ll have some sort of recourse with.

Now, if it’s a family member or it’s a friend, obviously, that’s a great route to go. But if you don’t have any family members and friends that could attend these auctions, consider hiring a real estate agent to do it for you. As a matter of fact, in some states, a real estate agent has to do it for you by law because they have to be licensed in order to represent you.

Obviously, a real estate agent will most likely not steal your money because they know if they steal your money – the $1,000 deposit or the $5,000 you give them or whatever it is – they know that the recourse against them is that they lose their license, they lose their livelihood. So find somebody responsible like a good real estate agent that has a history in the business. If you can’t find a real estate agent, maybe a financial planner with a license.

Now, the third thing here is that you have to put everything in writing. Create some sort of contract. You have to put things such as expectations. You expect them to be there at this time until this time and everything like that. You have to put the bid amounts even in the contract. Say this is what you’re going to bid on my behalf. And obviously, the last thing you want to put in the contract is their pay because you are going to have to compensate them somehow.

Now the best way to arrange this is not through any commissions of any sort because it just doesn’t make sense. What? The more you pay for the property, the more you pay them? It just doesn’t make any sense. So pay them some sort of hourly rate. And it is going to cost you a decent amount of money. Not only do they have to trust you that you will go through with the purchase or they’ll have to have some sort of funds ready to go through that purchase on your behalf there at the auction, but you also have to trust them.

If you’re planning on paying somebody five bucks an hour, more than likely, that’s not going to be a very trustworthy person. I’m not going to sit in an auction room for eight hours for 40 bucks because it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. So what you have to do, you have to plan on compensating this person well. It might be 20 bucks, 40 bucks an hour. It might even be 50 bucks an hour. If it’s a short auction, it could even be $100 an hour or something. But you have to plan on compensating the person well because obviously, usually the more you compensate somebody and the more they expect in compensation, the more you can trust them. Again, you also have to have other recourse as far as like the contract in writing and it would be great if this person has some sort of license that you can go after.

So there you have it. It can be more work and it can be a little bit more risky and it can kind of put you on edge, I guess, if you’re not familiar with it or if you’ve never done it before. But if there’s no other options, this can certainly be a viable option for you to attend that auction without physically being there.

I really hope you’ve enjoyed this video. If you’d like to see similar videos, head on over to my website at TaxSaleAcademy.com, which you can do by clicking the blue link right here next to my head. Again, it will take you to the TaxSaleAcademy.com. Once you get there, download your free copy of my e-book, The Tax Sale Investing Blueprint, and you’ll be on your way to a very successful tax sale investing career.

Have a wonderful day, folks! Bye-bye.