Someone at a conference yesterday told me that his fund has never taken a deed and treats every conversion as a failure.

That 0.5 percent holds because they hired collectors, not acquisition analysts.

The part that would wreck my model is redeployment speed, not yield on any single cert.

Florida's 2-year redemption window and NJ's 6-percent statutory penalty basically bribe owners into paying, so 0.5 percent is easier there than it sounds.

The framing of "collections vs. real estate" is useful but I think it undersells how much the 7.1 net depends on the specific municipal profiles they picked, not just the operational posture. Florida and New Jersey both have dense suburban tax bases where owners almost always have equity and almost always redeem, so a collections-first approach works because the underlying population of certificates supports it. You take that same philosophy into rural Georgia or Mississippi where a meaningful slice of your book is vacant land with no equity and no owner who will ever answer the phone, and your 0.5 percent holds zero. I would want to know what percentage of his pool by count, not by dollar, is residential homestead before I rebuilt my model around his numbers.

The skill gap between a good skip tracer and a good title examiner is about 40 years of compounding problems.