Tax Deed Auctions: Avoid These Costly Mistakes

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Summary – Transcript

Hey, Mike Wolf from Mike Wolf Mastery. I’m coming to you from beautiful Rome in Italy. Just last month, I was reading about how somebody in Broward County, Florida, so South Florida, thought they were buying a villa at a real estate auction and instead they bought a hundred foot by one foot strip of land that actually was dividing two villas. They later went on, they accused the county of being deceptive.

Just got me to thinking how important it is to get a good education, know what you’re doing before you jump in, instead of going and then blaming somebody else because of your lack of education, lack of knowledge, lack of skills. In defense of the county, they did everything they were supposed to do. They put the information on their website, exactly enough information that somebody– Put it this way, my very beginner students would have been able to catch the fact this is just an empty piece. It was just a little piece land.

By the way, when you buy a piece of land, you’re taking somebody else’s liability off of their plate. For example, in this case, that piece of land was probably owned by the builder who had built the villas. Quite often they get stuck with these little pieces of land they can’t really develop, they can’t put anything on, and it’s just a liability to own that piece of land because it’s never going to generate revenue. They’ve got to pay taxes on it. You’ve got to insure it, because if somebody were to get injured on it, they could sue you. Anyway, somebody else’s headache just became your headache if you buy something that you weren’t really supposed to be buying.

This person in any case thought they were buying a villa worth $177,000 for $9,100. They thought they hit the jackpot. It turns out they bought a piece of land that has zero value. They lost $9,100. Not too long ago, I had somebody who sent me an email asking what the cost of my training was. When I told them, he said it was an arm, a leg and a kidney. I’m thinking, well, it’s a whole lot cheaper. My training is a lot less than that person just lost on that piece of land. I see people making these mistakes month after month, after month.

By the way, my students would know that when you have a vacant piece of land where there’s no home on it, the address is going to start with a zero. If it says 0 Main Street, you’re not buying a home, you’re buying a piece of land. That’s a little tip for you. I’ll give you a second tip. I was at the auction a couple years ago with my students and we had determined that there was this one property worth probably around 90,000. We wanted to get it for about 50 cents on the dollar. We wanted to get it for $45,000.

Anyway one of my students bid up to his max $45,000. People kept bidding and bidding, and bidding. This property got bid up to probably around a hundred. I think it was $125,000, something like that. Like I said, it was worth only $90,000. I went up to the person who won and said, “Listen, congratulations on getting the property. What can you tell me about it?” He goes, “I went on Zillow and it says it’s worth $150,000, so I think I got a really good deal.”

Tip number two, you can’t rely on Zillow, and not just Zillow but any of those online websites that pretend they can give you the value of a property. Those are highly inaccurate. If you use those numbers, you’re going to get yourself in really big trouble. Tip number two, get a professional on your team. Meaning, a realtor. My students get access to my realtor who charges $10 to do what’s called a CMA, comparative market analysis for them. Where he’ll look at other properties in the neighborhood, show you what has sold in similar condition, similar size. You can find out exactly what the property is worth instead of having to rely on fake numbers. That’s going to obviously skew what you’re willing to pay for a property if you think it’s worth a lot more than it really is. That’s number two.

I’m going to give you a third tip. When I was trying to figure out how to do these liens and deeds back in the day, I was so confused because I took so many courses, I read so many books, and there’s so much conflicting information. One of the things that really stuck with me is I went to some other trainings where they said, “Oh, you can do this from the comfort of your own home.” They basically told you, “Oh, just Google the property and you look at the pictures online.” I’m going to tell you that is one of the most dangerous things you can do. Because these properties, one, you have sometimes tenants or owners in there that are not very happy that they’re being evicted because their homes going up for auction. Sometimes they’ll trash a property. In other cases, those pictures may have been taken a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, and who knows what the property looks like.

On my training, I take my students, we actually go on a bus driving around the City of Houston looking at properties. We have had numerous times gone to properties that look really good on the website. We looked at the picture, it looked phenomenal. The students were super excited. We’ve had somewhere, literally, when we got there, it was like smoldering ashes of where a home used to be sitting on an empty piece of land. If you did this from the comfort of your own home, you would have lost a lot of money.

You don’t necessarily have to go view the properties, but once again I’ve got people on my team that will actually go and do that for you. You’re going to give them a list of the properties that interest you. They’re going to go do the driving for you, take the pictures, take the videos, give you their opinion on the neighborhood, on the house, on the street, the scape. All that stuff. It’s going to save you– One mistake will wipe you out. It’s going to cost a lot more than the training that you’re going to get.

More importantly, if we think back that poor guy who bid $9,100 on this little piece of land with zero value, is he ever going to do this again? He actually built up the courage to go take action and failed. Is he ever going to do it again? Probably not. If he would have succeeded, this could have been his new career. This could have changed his life financially. Maybe he could have quit his job, done something that he was interested in fulltime, but no, he’s probably, if anything, going to be the opposite. He’s going to be shy to get back into any kind of real-estate investing. It’s just to me really, really sad because it was so avoidable. Like I said, my beginner students wouldn’t have made that mistake.

I hope you found these three tips helpful. If you want more information, click the link below. It’s going to tell you about my next training, all the details. I would love to have you there. My students, as I mentioned, as I alluded to earlier, they get access to me. I’m going to be there to mentor you not just for the four days of the training, but for the year following that to make sure you don’t make any mistakes. You get access to my teams indefinitely. They can go bid for you. They can go drive by the properties for you. They’re going to be your safety net to make sure that you don’t make those really easily avoidable mistakes. Once again, I’m Mike Wolf, thank you so much for tuning in and we’ll see you soon. Take care.