12) Intro to Due Diligence

In this video, we’ll examine some tools that you can use to perform due diligence on potential tax lien and deed investments.

Although many small or rural counties don’t have amazing websites and web tools, we are finding that increasingly counties are making property information available online.  This makes researching dramatically easier. 

When we first started teaching new investors how to perform due diligence, we needed to take them to the county building, show them how to find the physical parcel maps and ledgers, and how to sift through the gigantic books to find what we needed before making an investment. This, of course, is not the case in many counties, and unless you’re dead set on investing in a small, rural county where this is still the case, you can instead invest from home using online tools all over the country.

In a previous training video we described the uses of both the Property Appraiser’s and Tax Collector’s office and what you would find on each counties website, but as a quick reminder, the Appraiser’s website is where we would find information about the property itself including the assessed value, images taken by the appraiser, past sales history, improvement and property change history, other liens or encumbrances. The Tax Collector will have information like past delinquent taxes and the history of redemptions.

Let’s quickly look through a county’s website to demonstrate what county records might look like for the Appraiser and Tax Collector.