Tracking 63 tax lien certificates on a spreadsheet nobody should trust

63 positions at 1,840 average, so what's your all-in per certificate once you count your time? If the auction week plus the tracking work is eating 80 hours, that's a real cost against a 116k book and it should be in the return you're telling yourself you got.

@paulgrant17 is right, most counties will give some kind of file. It is usually ugly, fixed width text or a PDF that fights you, but retyping 63 parcel numbers by hand is how a certificate ends up unfindable later. On the prior year lien question, that is not a spreadsheet problem, that is a research problem that should be closed before bidding. In most areas the tax history on a parcel shows which years are outstanding and whether they sold. That is worth checking now, because if someone holds an earlier year their position relative to a later buyer is set by state law, and that is worth knowing before paying subs.

Starting from nothing here so this may be a dumb question. When you say bidding down on anything with a house, does that mean the good parcels earn less? That seems backwards from how I thought risk worked.

@bmoreno23 it's not backwards, it's competition. Everybody wants the certificate on the occupied house because it's nearly certain to redeem, so they bid the rate down against each other until the yield is thin. The 14% ones @carlos_nunez got are probably parcels nobody else wanted, which tells you something about them.

Is there a service side to this? Someone doing the tracking and subsequent tax filing for lien buyers as a paid function? Feels like a business hiding inside @carlos_nunez's problem.

@derekj19 there are servicers, mostly aimed at bigger books. At 63 certificates the pricing will not work for you. The rule worth applying is that you do not buy software or hire anyone until you can describe the process well enough to hand it to someone else. @carlos_nunez cannot yet, and that is the actual signal here.

Stay on the spreadsheet. Add columns, don't add software. Specifically add: prior year liens yes/no/unknown, sub tax due date, date you paid the sub, redemption received amount, and a status column with maybe five values. Then sort by the deadline column every Monday for ten minutes.

I hit my own ceiling at a different thing and the lesson was the same. The tool almost never fixes it. The routine does.

The batch payment problem is the one worth solving before next season. Ask the treasurer's office how they remit and whether they can send a detail file with it. Some will, some absolutely will not, and it varies by county, but the ask costs you a phone call.

How did you decide which parcels to bid on in the first place? That is the part that stops most people before a first auction, working out how much drive-by or photo review is enough to justify itself on an 1,800 dollar certificate.

@devon_pierce at 1,800 a certificate you can't afford much diligence per parcel, which is exactly why the screening happens by category rather than parcel by parcel. Improved residential inside a service area, skip everything under a certain lot size, skip anything with a mobile home title question. Then look closely at the twenty that survive. @carlos_nunez, the column worth adding is a note field for who is living there. Occupancy is the best available predictor of redemption and it costs nothing to record once.

63 is right about where spreadsheet tracking tends to give out in other asset classes too. Volume is rarely what breaks it. What breaks it is two people touching the same file. If you are the only one in the spreadsheet you have more room than you think.

Don't skip next season over this. Buy fewer, maybe 25, and use the season to run the process end to end with the fixes @samantha_ruiz listed. Sitting out a year costs you the calendar and you'll come back with the same unpracticed system.

@joe_delgado5's advice and @angela_burke's advice point opposite directions and I think both can be right depending on whether the 63 redeem on schedule. @carlos_nunez, how many have redeemed so far?

Scope creep in tracking systems is real. Every column you add gets filled in for a month and then abandoned. Five columns you maintain beat twenty you don't.

You mentioned deadlines to start the process on anything past its window. Those are statutory and they differ by state, and missing one can cost you the certificate entirely in some places. That's the one item on your list I'd get a local attorney to confirm in writing rather than working out from the county website.

Every position teaches you something, and 63 taught you that the intake was sloppy. That's a cheap lesson at this size. Fix the intake, which is the export file @laurenkim53 mentioned plus the prior year check before bidding, and the back end gets much smaller. Most of what looks like a tracking problem started as a data entry problem at the auction.