Hey everyone, and welcome to the next mini-course in our series about investing in tax lien certificates. This course is going to be all about doing your due diligence, mitigating the risk through research. Now we’ve already gone over filtering your list, that side of research, but we’re going to actually approach our research from another angle in the sense of not just information about the property, we’ve already been through that in a lot of detail. We’re now going to look at what are potential problems? What are some issues that could really come in and bite us in the rear end, if we’re not paying attention to them? That’s what we’re talking about when we say mitigating risk through research.
I’m Mike Decker. I’ve been handling all of the mini-courses for this big course about investing in tax lien certificates. I’m a contributor to myOpenPath.com. So what is it that we’re going to actually be going through? How can we mitigate risk through research, the specific areas?
First, in Module One we’re going to talk about establishing a clear chain of title. The majority of our work is going to start and have to do with the recorder’s website. That’s very important stuff. You’ve been kind of familiar. We’ve used it to look for liens and mortgages. Now I’m going to tell you how to use it to search for a clear chain of title.
Then, we’re going to talk about how to understand a plat map. Make sure you’re not buying into a measuring errors, we saw in one of our videos earlier in the last lesson. We want to make sure you know exactly what you’re getting, where the dimensions are, what the location is.
Module Number Three is going to measure true distance and topography. Even a plat map will not give you the whole picture as to a property that you’re looking at. So we’re going to go in there and make sure that you can accurately measure distance and you can accurately know the make-up, the terrain, of the property.
Then Module Number Four, Let FEMA help you. FEMA, The Federal Emergency Management Agency, I believe, FEMA, keeps a record of the different danger areas across the United States. So we want to tap into that database to better understand what this property that we’re purchasing, what is it getting into? Are we purchasing something that’s on the banks of the Mississippi that floods every year? Are we buying something that’s in Tornado Alley? Well, that’s what we’re going to look into.
Then finally in Module Number Five, Environmental Issues. This is very important because we’re going to understand some of the less tangible things and that might be harder to find out about, especially if you live across the country and you don’t know the area. We’re going to learn about how you can research potential environmental issues.
These five modules together are going to help you mitigate your risk exponentially and going to help you really understand what you’re getting into, in particular, this is useful if you want to keep the underlying real estate. You don’t want to get a tax lien on something that has an issue and then be stuck with it. In particular, if your goal is to get the real estate, well then we want to make sure that the real estate does not have any huge problems that are going to make it, using it or selling it later on an issue or even worse something that you’re going to be stuck with the task of cleaning up some other person’s negligence or their issue.
So you’re going to love this. This is going to be super interesting. We’re going to really dive in there, look at tools that are across the Internet, so please stay with us and I’ll see you on the next video.
