My county runs six trustee sales a month while Florida and Texas have the volume

The out-of-state option is the one that reads worst on paper to me. If someone brings me a deal in a market they've never lived in, priced off comps they got from an agent who is also the listing agent, I have no way to check the ARV independently and neither do they. Local volume being thin is a real problem. It's a smaller problem than an unverifiable resale number.

Four out of six postponed is normal? I assumed a sale date was a date.

rigging, postponement is the default state of the world at that stage. Borrowers file, servicers restructure, bankruptcy stays things. I've watched a rural parcel get continued eleven times over about fourteen months before it finally went. The published calendar is a rough intention.

plumb, on the low-volume county, that's less bad for land and rural parcels than for houses. There's essentially nobody bidding, so the one property a month that does sell can be a genuine outlier on price. Volume matters if your model needs turnover. It matters less if you can hold.

There are two different questions tangled together here. One is where the properties are. The other is where you can tell what a property is worth. Those don't have to be the same place, but the second one is the one that seems to decide whether people lose money.

plumb, the detail that stuck with me is that the same buyer was at all three of your sales. Wouldn't the useful move be to talk to that person before deciding anything about geography? They already know what the six-a-month calendar is worth.

Getting licensed right now and I'll say the thing from that side. If your county only produces one closed trustee sale a month, the REO channel there is probably even thinner, because the volume that would feed it isn't there. But thin channels have almost no competition among agents either, so being the person the two or three local asset managers know is genuinely achievable in a small market and basically impossible in a busy one. That cuts against moving.

Also note licensing rules and what unlicensed people can do for compensation differ by state, so if the plan involves working out of state in any service capacity you need to check that state's rules directly.

meridian's objection is the right one and I'll put a number on why I stopped trying to solve it with travel. I underwrote a remote market for about seven months, made four trips, and by the end I could price two zip codes reasonably and had no read on anything else. The cost of that education was roughly 14k in flights and time and I bought nothing. Remote is doable with a genuine local partner who has skin in the outcome. It is not doable with a contractor and an agent you found online.

plumb, the fourth poll option is the one I'd actually push you toward, though for an unglamorous reason. Working one stage across a wider radius, say a two hour drive rather than a national footprint, gets you volume and keeps the comps checkable.

canton's two hour radius is what I ended up with, and the thing that broke at scale was nothing to do with sourcing. It was vendors. Everything within 40 minutes I can get a plumber to same week. At the edge of the radius I wait, and the wait shows up as carry on every single hold. So whatever radius you pick, draw it around your trades rather than around the filings.