Did anyone else see that a scaled lien fund reported 0.3% average winning bid rate across three New Jersey counties last quarter

The 0.3% figure is the bid-down rate, which is the interest rate the fund accepted at auction, not the return it earned on capital. Those two numbers can be far apart, and understanding why is the thing that makes this observation useful.

Here is how the gap works. New Jersey's statutory rate is 18%, but at auction buyers compete by bidding that rate down. A winning bid of 0.3% means the fund agreed to earn only 0.3% annual interest if the owner redeems the lien. Most owners do redeem, so a portfolio full of 0.3% bids produces something close to 0.3% yield on that portion of the book. The 18% figure in a pitch deck describes the ceiling the law allows, not what a competitive auction delivers.

Your read on the residential-with-clear-title compression is consistent with what the strategy guide describes: competition in popular jurisdictions compresses yields acutely for institutional buyers. The interesting question is what sits below that layer. Funds sometimes accept near-zero bids on liquid parcels to deploy capital at volume, then look for yield recovery through penalty fees, redemption timing, or a smaller slice of messier liens where competition drops off. Whether that is what this fund is doing, I genuinely cannot tell from outside either.

One thing to confirm with a securities attorney before drawing conclusions: what disclosures a fund structured as a limited partnership is required to make about bid logs and weighted portfolio yield. That shapes what you could reasonably expect to see even as a larger LP.

When you say you are tracking Ocean and Burlington, are you pulling the actual bid sheets from county records, or working from secondary sources? That changes how much the compression you are seeing reflects the full auction picture.

The piece nobody is saying out loud is that even if 0.3% reflects their actual blended premium over statutory, the carry period is doing the heavy lifting on returns and that is where I would be pushing. In Ocean County specifically I have seen redemption windows stretch past 24 months on anything where the owner has any equity left to protect, which is fine on paper but your deployed capital is sitting there earning the bid rate, not the 18%, until that clock runs out. If the fund is underwriting to quick redemption cycles to make the IRR look clean, that is the assumption I would stress-test. I was an LP in a structure out of Camden-area liens a few years back and the projected hold was 14 months average, actual came in around 22, which compressed annualized returns meaningfully even though the statutory rate was exactly as promised. 0.3% blended premium on a 22-month hold in a soft auction environment is not the same story as 0.3% on a 10-month cycle, and that math is buried in every deck I have seen from funds operating in this space.