Hey everyone, and welcome to the next course in our series about tax lien certificate investing. This one is about why property owners stop paying their property taxes. If you’re a property owner, obviously, you recognize that you’ve spent a significant amount of money and time to purchase this property. So it’s probably unthinkable for you to put that ownership in danger for what might amount to a couple hundred bucks or a thousand bucks a year, right? But as we’re going to see, not everybody feels the same about their property.
Now, the knee jerk reaction for a lot of people looking at this, it might be: “Well, if the owner isn’t worried about keeping their property, there must be something wrong with it, right? It must not be as valuable as I thought”. Well, that’s what we actually want to clear up. That’s a very common misconception that a lot of people have about investing in tax-delinquent property. And unfortunately, it keeps them from ever really making the profits that other investors do. So what we want to do instead is focus on the facts. Who are these people? And why have they stopped paying?
Now, early on, I’ve learned to stop asking that question why in the sense of, why can’t these people get their act together? And I’ve just understood it. I have seen a few common reasons, a few ways that the people express themselves, and that’s what I’m going to talk about here. But at the end of the day, it’s an idea that they don’t value the property enough to do what they’ve got to do.
And as we’re going to talk about in a future course, about the ethics of this, this is ethical. We’re helping the community, and we’re essentially becoming a hard money lender for these individuals, right? We’re buying them two or three years’ worth of time. So we shouldn’t feel like we’re predatory lenders. We shouldn’t feel like we’re vulture lenders. Instead, what we’re going to do is just try to understand a little bit what’s going on in these people heads and help us see that, really, the problem is not the property. The problem is the property owner.
So this next one here is just my name and my picture. I’m Mike Decker. I’m a contributor to MyOpenPath.com. You’ve probably heard my voice on a couple of these courses here.
In this first one, I just want to give you a little preview of what we’re going to be talking about, why property owners. It’s three main reasons. One, life changes. Two, they don’t see the value. And three, there’s complications after the property owner dies.
So life changes. When people buy properties, when they buy real estate, they’re at a certain point in their lives that maybe decades later, something’s changed, and they no longer view the real estate the same way. Those changes, as we’ll see, can affect whether or not they decide to keep paying that money per year to maintain their property. Then we’re going to see how some people don’t see the value. Now, recognize, that doesn’t mean the property does not have value. It means they don’t see it. They don’t want to see it. It’s actually become a burden for them.
In module number 3, there are complications after the property owner dies. Now, this could be probate. It could be heirs fighting among themselves. It could be the heirs don’t want it. As we’ll see, there are various ways that the death of a property owner can affect what happens to that piece of real estate. And it doesn’t change the fact that the community still needs the money to pay for those expenses. And so a tax lien will still be issued, no matter what. So now it’s just for the investor to get in there and to take advantage of what’s already there in that place.
Now, as I mentioned in a previous video, I use these methods actively in my investing. So what I’m going to be showing here in the next few modules are few examples that I’ve personally come across. I think, yeah, they’re all here in Arizona. And it’ll be an interesting little profile of different types of personalities you’ll find and why they stopped paying but how that was not a reflection of the property itself, but of the property owner. So stay with us, this is going to be an awesome course.
