Concentrate the whole certificate budget in one county, or spread it across three or four states?

Naive question from outside the buying side: who does the paperwork when you're in four states? Is there someone you hire per state, or is it all you sitting with four sets of forms and four calendars? I ask because the answer changes what the spread actually costs, and your post treats that cost as a learning cost rather than a bill.

The part that would sink me is the calendar. I want income that doesn't turn into a second job, and four states means four sets of deadlines I have to personally not miss. One county, fewer things to forget.

Same shape as running a service business in two metros. The second market never costs half of the first, it costs about eighty percent, because nothing transfers except your own judgment. Licensing, vendors, the way inspectors behave, all of it resets. I'd expect your second state to eat most of a year before it produces anything, and I'd want the yield gap to be big enough to pay for that year.

Read the foreclosure chapter of the statute before you read the interest rate, in whichever state you're considering, because the notice and service requirements that decide whether your certificate ever becomes a deed vary by state and some of them are unforgiving about who has to be served and how.

The things I'd want in writing per state before committing money: whether premium paid above the tax amount earns interest or is simply lost, whether subsequent taxes you pay accrue at the same statutory rate as the original certificate, what happens to your position if the county resells the parcel before your redemption period expires, and what the actual filing cost is to begin the foreclosure action.

That's four questions, and in my experience every one has a different answer in every state, sometimes a different answer by county within a state. Whether a given step is done correctly in your case is something an attorney licensed in that state has to tell you.

So my lean is concentration, though I'd define concentration as one statute rather than one county. Learning a statute is the expensive part. Learning a second county under the same statute is cheap by comparison. meridian, if I were placing your budget I'd want to know how many parcels the counties in your target state actually list, because in some states one county can't absorb a real budget and the question answers itself.

Every unit I've owned taught me something specific to the building. I'd guess certificates work the same way and the teaching is per county, not per certificate. Which argues for enough volume in one place that the teaching gets used more than once.

Is redemption behavior something you can actually observe before you bid, or only after? If there's a way to see what share of last year's certificates redeemed in a given county I'd want that number in front of me before I chose between one county and four.

There's a business in the thing marlow is worried about. Somebody tracking redemption deadlines and foreclosure filing windows across states for small holders, with a real diary and real reminders. Not sure the fee anyone would pay covers the liability of getting a date wrong, which is probably why I haven't seen it done well.

The diversification argument is weaker than it looks. Redemption gets driven by whether the owner can find the money, and the pressures pushing people into delinquency right now, insurance, taxes, rates, are national. So spreading across four states doesn't buy you uncorrelated redemption, it buys you four different auction competition levels. That's still worth something, but call it what it is. You're diversifying your access to yield, not your credit risk.

I hold land, so my bias shows. If part of what you want is the parcel and not just the interest, spreading matters more, because the parcels worth ending up with are thin on the ground in any one county and you're waiting years for one. I'd rather be in five counties looking at five small lists of raw land than one county looking at one.

Rural counties settle this for you. The lists where I look run a couple hundred parcels total and half are unbuildable, so there is no version where I place real money in one place. I'm across four counties because I have to be, and the two that are in the same state are dramatically easier than the odd one out.

What are people actually using to track this? I've looked at county assessor and treasurer sites and the quality swings from a proper searchable list to a scanned PDF. If the answer is a spreadsheet you build by hand per county then the spread case gets expensive fast.

I'm slow on decisions like this so I'll ask rather than argue. If you concentrate in one county and the bid-down rounds clear at a rate you won't accept, what do you do with the money that year? Sit on it? Because that idle year has a cost too and nobody's put a number on it yet in this thread.

I've done this badly, so here's the specific failure. Second state, ten certificates, small money. What broke wasn't the buying, it was that the procedure for starting the foreclosure action was different enough that I misread which deadline mattered and had to hire local counsel on short notice. The bill was several times the extra interest I'd gone there to get. The first state I still handle myself. anchor, to your point, an idle year would have been cheaper than that year.

I'm still list building and haven't bid, but the thing I notice is that my list quality is wildly uneven across counties. In the one county I've worked properly I can tell you which parcels I'd take title on. In the others I have addresses and nothing else. That gap feels like the real argument for staying put until the list is actually good.

Depends whether you want money back or a building. If you actually want the property, deed states and deed sales are a different game and the spread question changes, because you're shopping for one specific asset and it can be anywhere. If you want yield, you're running a paper portfolio and paper portfolios reward doing the same thing repeatedly in the same place.

compass, that reframing helps me, because the per-state fixed cost is exactly the kind of thing a service could absorb if it were narrow enough. One state, deep, sold to twenty small holders. Broad multi-state tracking is where I'd expect it to fall apart.

Changing my lean after reading quarry and compass. I came in thinking spread was obviously safer and I was pricing the wrong risk. Several counties, one state.

I've been analyzing this exact question for longer than it deserves. Voting several counties one state and then going to look at actual lists instead of reading more threads about lists.

One state. Six months in and I still can't recite one statute properly, so the idea of two is comedy.

The thing I'm taking from this is that certificates reward repetition in one place and deeds reward looking everywhere, and those are almost different strategies wearing the same name. girder said it plainly. I need to decide which one I'm actually doing before the geography question means anything to me.