How to analyze Sacramento tax sale properties?

Research, research, research and some more research. Tax sales are all cash purchases that come with a lot of risk. You will need cash to make the purchase, so knowing that it will be risky, we are sharing our secret sauce tools in starting our property research process.

On an annual basis, the Sacramento County Assessor’s office publishes a PDF list of properties that are eligible for sale at their February and May tax sales. These lists are updated based on owners’ ability to pay their tax bills. The county provides these updates periodically on their site. The big drawback is that it is difficult to translate PDF lists into aggregate and easily dissectible information. Sectioning off areas of investment and property information is a hassle, so for our own research, we developed a way to pull over 30 points of information per property AND an ability to map in aggregate all of the tax sale listings.

How is this helpful?

As investors, we target specific areas to generate a return on our investments. We need to know where the properties are located in an easy to navigate fashion AND an ability to easily dig into the property details. This is where our competitive advantage comes into play. We don’t waste time researching properties, rather we analyze them. Our analysis enables us to determine properties we want to target for investments.

Here is how it looks: