How to Foreclose on a Land Tax Lien (1022)
Transcript:
Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here.
JilL DeWit: Hi.
Steven Butala: Welcome to The Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala-
JilL DeWit: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the beach in sunny Southern California.
Steven Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about how to foreclose on a land tax lien. This background that we have and our little beach house here in this beach community out of Los Angeles couldn't be more inappropriate for this topic. How to foreclose on a land tax lien is maybe like one of the most boring things we could possibly talk about, yet maybe one of the most profitable, and then the stuff going on behind is like all fun and games [crosstalk 00:00:37]-
JilL DeWit: Hilarious.
Steven Butala: And horsing around. Who cares about taxes?
JilL DeWit: For those of you who do not see this on YouTube, you're just watching or just listening or Spotify or something like that, it might be worth checking out the YouTube channel just so you can get a little glimpse of what's going on behind us and I'll explain the bicycles and the yelling and the frisbees and the noise behind us. It's good.
Steven Butala: If you foreclose on several tax liens this month, this is where you hang out.
JilL DeWit: Oh, that's true. There you go. This can happen to you.
Steven Butala: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community.
JilL DeWit: Cody asked, "We have a property under contract to buy, but part of the heirs cannot be located by a closing attorney, and the other relatives do not know anyone from that side of the family." Well, that happens.
Steven Butala: This is a very, very, very appropriate question for this topic today.
JilL DeWit: Yes, this is good.
Steven Butala: This is why, this story that Cody is telling, this is why that properties become in this tax situation that they're in, and this is why they're foreclosable. I'll get to that in a minute.
JilL DeWit: "Is there a service or an investigator that you have used to track down heirs and see if anyone is still alive on record? Any help you can give would be greatly appreciated." This is in North Carolina.
Steven Butala: Good. North Carolina is a very good tax lien foreclosure state, by the way. What Cody is asking is, "Look I've contact"... he's sent a letter out or offer out, it got accepted, it got signed, and the seller says, "I would love to sell you this piece of property, but you got to find the other people because they're on deed and I know they're alive." Cody hired somebody or he's asking if he can hire somebody to close the deal and to find the heirs and get everybody ready to sign. The answer is no... the answer is yes, you can absolutely hire somebody to find all these people. It's called skip tracing or private investigation, and here's the tools that most people use.
Steven Butala: You can use a very glossed over service called Salesgenie, you can use LexisNexis, which is what most lawyers use to locate people to serve them, TransUnion, the credit score company, has a tremendous database on skip tracing. You need to find somebody. You can do it, but here's my real answer to this question. Why? Why wouldn't you just purchase... What you need to do is accomplish equitable title, which means you have an interest in the real estate and then you can go through a foreclosure action [crosstalk 00:03:17]-
JilL DeWit: There you go, but then it's [crosstalk 00:03:17]-