How a tax delinquent list is built
Unpaid property tax is the most durable distress signal in the business, because unlike almost everything else it is recorded, dated and public.
Where the data comes from
Each county treasurer knows exactly who has not paid. That information is public, and the tax roll is the origin of every tax-delinquent list anybody sells.
What differs is the path from that roll to your spreadsheet. Some counties publish a clean file; some publish a portal you can search one parcel at a time; some publish a PDF. National data providers normalise all of that, which is why coverage from a national source is even across counties rather than depending on how modern a given treasurer's website is.
It is also why two providers' lists for the same county can differ. They may have collected on different dates, applied different minimums, or made different decisions about what counts as delinquent.
What the signal means
Not paying property tax is rarely an oversight for long. It usually means something has changed — a death, a divorce, a job, a property that has become a burden rather than an asset.
How long the taxes have been unpaid matters more than the amount. One missed cycle is often an administrative accident. Several years of arrears is a person who has decided, consciously or not, that the property is somebody else's problem.
The amount owed is a weaker signal than people assume, because it scales with the property value rather than with the owner's difficulty.
Where it overlaps with a tax lien
A tax lien is what can happen next: in many states the county sells the debt, and a lien is recorded against the property. So a lien list is generally a later, harder stage of the same story a delinquency list tells.
Whether a state sells liens or deeds, and what the redemption period looks like, varies — and in several states it varies by county. We do not publish a state-by-state table of that, because a confident wrong answer on something an investor might act on is worse than none. The county treasurer will tell you.
In our own pulls, lien lists tend to reach a more distressed owner than plain delinquency, and both outperform the lists built on softer signals.
Questions people ask
Which is the better list to pull, tax lien or tax delinquent?
Where a state has real lien data, liens tend to reach an owner further into the process. Tax delinquent is the broader list and covers more properties. Both are worth working, and which is better in a given county usually comes down to how much of each exists there.
Is the owner about to lose the house?
Sometimes, and usually not yet. Tax timelines run in years, not weeks, which is precisely why this list is workable — there is time for a conversation. A foreclosure notice is the list where the deadline is short.
How often should I pull the same county again?
The roll changes when the county updates it, so pulling the same county monthly mostly buys you the same names. A campaign is usually better served by working the list you have all the way through than by refreshing it.
Related
Pick a county and a list type, or send your own addresses. Mobile numbers only, litigator and DNC scrubbed, and anything the county does not hold is credited back.