In our weekly question segment we provide a few pieces of advice to Tyler, who will be attending his first tax sale auction soon.
Transcript:
Hey, folks! It’s Casey Denman here with TaxSaleAcademy.com, answering your weekly question. This week’s question comes from Tyler, and he says, “I’ll be attending my first tax sale auction next week. Any last minute advice?”
Tyler, great question. It’s a question I can go on and on and on for. And actually, I’m considering doing a video series just on what you should expect at a tax sale auction. So I can answer this very lengthily, but I’ll try to give you just a few key points that you need to look out for, more or less.
First and foremost, you have to do your research. If your research is not done very thoroughly, you shouldn’t even be attending the tax sale auction, unless you’re of course just going for pure curiosity reasons. Don’t bid on a piece of property unless you know absolutely everything you can about that particular piece of property.
The second little tip here is to stay organized, especially when you’re attending a tax sale auction where there’s hundreds and hundreds of different properties offered for sale. You have to stay organized. Develop some sort of system for yourself.
A system I use, I basically just get a three-ring binder like this right here. This is what I used for an auction last week, as a matter of fact. I put the properties in it. It’s a system that’s worked very, very well for me. So develop a system for yourself where you can follow along and stay organized very, very easily.
Another one is to arrive early at the auction. A lot of times, there’s going to be lines to register for these auctions. And the last thing you want to do is be stuck in a line while the auctioneer is explaining the very crucial rules or auctioning off the piece of property that you came to bid on.
So arrive early. Get there at least 15 minutes early so you can register, get a good seat and that kind of thing. It’s a lot easier to be early and have to kill a few minutes looking through your notes than it is to arrive late and miss out on the property that you’re interested in.
And the last little tidbit here is probably the most important one. It’s to pay attention. Pay attention to what’s going on in the auction room, pay attention to the auctioneer, pay attention to your surroundings. The auctioneer might change the rules at the very last minute, which can have a huge impact on you.
I’ve seen this happen time and time again. The auctioneer might have something that just pops up at the last minute that completely throws you off-guard. So pay attention to the auctioneer, pay attention to what’s going on around you, pay attention to who’s bidding, and obviously, you need to pay very close attention to what property that they’re auctioning off at that very moment.
Tyler, good luck next week on your first tax sale auction. If you’d like to follow up or if anybody else has any questions about tax sale investing, head on over to my website at TaxSaleAcademy.com. And you can do that clicking the blue link at the bottom of this video. Again, it will take you to TaxSaleAcademy.com where you can submit your question and it’s very possible I’ll give you a video response just like this one.
Take care, folks! Bye-bye.