Rising delinquency is supposed to be the tailwind, so why are yields still getting bid down

Six months of watching lists and no bids placed, so I only have the observation side. What I see supports your first reading. The parcels that clear at almost nothing are the improved residential ones with clean-looking records, and those are exactly what an automated screen would flag. The parcels sitting unsold and going over-the-counter are the ones where you'd need to open a plat map and think.

canton, I'd push back a little on the small county idea. I chased that logic into a rural county with a paper sale and won at a good rate on eight parcels. Two of them turned out to be splinters from a road realignment with no independent use. Nobody was bidding against me because nobody wanted them. The absence of competition was information and I read it as opportunity.

flint's point is the one that would stop me. I want the version that works without drama, and going where the funds don't go sounds like going where the parcels are bad. Buying deeper into a list in a county whose records I can actually read seems less exciting and less likely to hand me a strip of hillside.

So what does over-the-counter inventory mean here, is that just parcels nobody bought at auction. And if nobody bought them at the statutory rate, isn't the reason usually the same reason flint hit, that the parcel itself is a problem.

rigging, over-the-counter is usually leftover certificates the county sells after the sale, at the full statutory rate, first come. Some of it is genuinely bad parcels. Some of it is fine and just came up late in a long sale when bidders had run out of money or attention. Sorting those two apart is the actual work, and it's why I've been reading for a year before spending anything.

Looking at this from the lending side rather than owning, and the compression pattern canton describes is what happens to any yield product once the capital gets organized. What I'd want to know is whether the statutory rate itself is under any pressure in these states, because that's the floor everything else references. Auction competition can only take you down from it.

tender's floor question is interesting to me because it's the one thing here that a legislature can change and an investor can't model. If a state trims its statutory rate, both of canton's strategies get worse at once and the small county advantage evaporates along with the big one.