One county deep or six counties wide for a first serious lien allocation

Depth, and it isn't close for me. On the construction side I've watched people take work in a new county because the margin looked better on paper, then eat the difference twice over learning a new inspector and a new set of local habits. The learning cost is real and it's front-loaded and it doesn't show up in the pro forma. One county until the process is boring, then add the second.

Neither, for someone like me. If diversification is the reason to spread and I can't operate six calendars, then I'm paying somebody who already operates them and accepting a lower net for it. wren, your two columns are both arguments for having an operation, and the question underneath is whether you want to be the operation.

Somebody should put a number on the per-county overhead, because that's the whole argument. Registration and deposit requirements, a day or two learning the rules, the auction day itself, then the ongoing calendar work. Call it 20 hours to open a county and 15 a year to keep it, plus whatever the deposit ties up. Six counties is 120 hours to start. If you're deploying $80k, that overhead is enormous per dollar. At $2m it disappears. So the answer to depth versus spread depends on the size of the allocation, and the threads here mix $50k people and $2m people as if they face the same choice.

Two terms worth separating before anyone votes, because they get used interchangeably here.

Diversification across parcels means holding many certificates so that one property failing to redeem doesn't determine your result. You can get that inside a single county. Forty certificates in one county already smooths the lumpiness that four certificates have.

Diversification across jurisdictions is a different protection. It covers the risk that one county's processing slows down, or that one state changes how its redemption or foreclosure procedures work. Those rules are set state by state, and a change in one state affects every certificate you hold there at once, so a book concentrated in a single state carries that exposure undiluted. Confirm the current procedures in any state you're considering with that state's treasurer or with counsel there, because summaries online go stale.

The reason tally's point matters is that the second kind of diversification has a fixed operating cost per jurisdiction and the first kind doesn't. So a smaller allocation can usually buy parcel diversification easily and jurisdiction diversification only expensively.

That's the tradeoff the poll is really asking about, and both answers are defensible depending on how much capital is carrying the overhead.