More than 5,000 tax lien and tax deed deals in 14 years
Every county posts a list of the lots it is about to sell for back taxes. The county's own websites also tell you which of those lots have no road, sit in a flood zone, or can never hold a house. Your First Lot Kit shows you where to find your county's list. Then it shows you the five things Phil Kessler checks on every lot before he bids. Phil has done more than five thousand tax lien and tax deed deals in fourteen years. It is the fastest and easiest way he knows of to invest in real estate. No cold calls, no direct mail, no door knocking, no bandit signs, no driving for dollars.
1. REVIEW THE LIST · 2. FOLLOW THE 5-STEP CHECKLIST · 3. MAKE YOUR BID
GET YOUR FIRST LOT KIT - $17 →The county already knows
Most people get told to wholesale, do creative finance, or start on Zillow with a mortgage calculator. Phil starts on a county website. Here is the difference.
Cold calling. Direct mail. Knocking on doors. Bandit signs on the corner. Driving for dollars for hours, looking for run-down houses. Months of work before you ever own anything.
The county posts the list. You run the 5-step checklist from your kitchen. You bid from home. No family about to lose a house. An empty lot nobody lives on, sold to a builder who puts a home on it, so the neighborhood gets better. It is the fastest and easiest way Phil knows of to invest in real estate.
Zillow prices are open-market prices. Many of the empty lots on there were posted by people who never checked what they bought. Phil watched one lot sell at a county sale for $4,300. It was listed at $8,500. It got lots of views and no buyer, because you cannot build on it.
Your county posts the lots it is about to sell for back taxes on its own website. It posts them before they reach Zillow. The list is free and public. It is where the lots come from.
Tenants, toilets, trash, and contractors. A mortgage on top. Tens of thousands of dollars down. Your money sits in the house for months while you wait on other people.
An empty lot has no tenant, no roof, and no contractor. At a county sale you can get in for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, depending on the state and the county. No mortgage.
The cheapest lots at a county sale are cheap for a reason. The county already knows something is wrong with them. Phil found a lot in Palatka with a tax value of $1,600. The lots around it were $10,000. It had no road.
A road to the lot. Zoning and land use. Flood zone. What sold nearby. The county's tax value against your bid. All five are on the county's own web pages. Once you know which page to open, a lot takes about five minutes.
A sneak peek at the check
Every lot on the county list is one of two things. A lot a builder will want, or one of these five traps. Each trap has one check. Each check lives on one county page. The cheat sheet tells you which.
A road to the lot. The $1,600 lot in Palatka was landlocked. Other people's land was all the way around it. You could buy it and never get to it. Nobody could ever build on it. The county knew. That is why the number was $1,600.
Zoning and land use. The land use line on the county property page will say drainage, or wasteland, or park. It can say that even when the zoning says homes. Zillow will not tell you that. Zillow will tell you an empty lot has three beds and two baths.
Flood zone. Phil's words: "Flood zone is sort of a bad word in Florida, but a lot of Florida is in a flood zone." It does not kill a deal by itself. It does change who can get a loan for a house on it later. So only sold lots in the same zone count.
What sold nearby. On the county map, draw a box around the lot. Look at what sold inside the box, and for how much. Sold prices only, never asking prices. If nothing like it has sold nearby, that tells you something too.
The county's tax value against your bid. The county gives every lot a tax value. The page calls it assessed value. It is usually a fraction of what the lot is worth. Phil keeps that number inside his budget. Then the calculator sets his top bid.
The county property page does not show wetlands or protected animals. The cheat sheet gives you one question to ask the county building department, word for word. So a lot that passed the five checks does not fail at the permit desk.
Fourteen years at the county sale
Phil Kessler has done more than five thousand tax lien and tax deed deals in fourteen years. He still buys at the county sales every season. He sells the lots to home builders.
Five things Phil looks at before he bids. All of them are on the county property page or the county map. Once you know which page to open, a lot takes about five minutes.
The sale list, the property page, the map, and the sale results are all public and free. You pay the county nothing to read them. You only pay when you win a bid. And you choose the bid.
Everything is online. It is on the next screen about a minute after you order. You can watch it on your phone.
Where your county posts its back-tax sale list. How to open it. How to read the opening bid and the deposit rule. So you pull lots from the same public list the builders read, before any of it reaches Zillow.
Phil on screen running all five checks on real lots from a real list, on the county's own pages. So you can tell a ditch from a lot a builder wants.
Included with your order
One page. Five checks. It names the county page to open for each one. It gives you the one question to ask the building department. Print it and keep it next to your laptop. Then you never skip a check when you are nervous the first time.
Put in the county's tax value and your budget. It gives you the most you should bid. The fastest way to lose on a good lot is to pay too much for it.
Phil takes a real county sale list. He runs the five checks on camera. He crosses off the lots that fail and bids on the ones that pass. Watching it done once takes most of the fear out of doing it yourself.
Ten real lots from a Putnam County, Florida sale list. Each one run through the five checks, pass or fail, and why. Practice on Phil's lots before you try your own.
One page on the three kinds of people who buy empty lots: builders, neighbors, and land buyers. Where to find each one in your county. So you know who you are buying for before you bid.
Ten county sales coming up in the next 30 days, with a link to each sale list. So you have a real list to check this week, not someday.
This call is about you and your first lot. Your advisor asks what you want land to do for you, how much time and money you can put in, whether you want to flip lots fast or hold them, the counties you're looking at, and what has kept you from bidding so far. Then you get a straight answer on the best next step for you. Before the call, think about how many lots you want to have bought and sold 12 months from now.
From Phil's students at United Tax Liens
Heather had never bought real estate before. She bought two empty lots in Florida and cleared the title. She sold both to builders for a profit of about $3,000 each. She calls those lots her stepping stone to bigger projects.
Jay's very first tax deed was an empty lot in Vero Beach. He paid about $12,000. Within a month, a land company mailed him an offer for more than double that. He sold it before he had even started on the title.
Dave bought two tax deed lots in Florida. He is listing them now. He plans to do five or six more.
"Those are the best ones I know of, not the average. Plenty of people take longer or do less." Phil Kessler
Your First Lot Kit is the first step
The kit gets you reading your county's list this week. It helps you sort the bargains from the traps. Once you have run it on a few lots, you may want the rest of what Phil does. Nobody is pushed up this ladder. Get the $17 kit, use it, and decide later.
$17, one time. Where the lists are, the five checks, the cheat sheet, the bid calculator, a recorded live deal, 10 lots Phil checked, who buys your lot, and the next 10 sales.
Phil's full course. From the sale list, to a clean title, to the builder who buys the lot. $97 on the public site, with a 90-day money back guarantee.
Software that puts every county's back-tax lots on one screen. No more opening county sites one at a time. Plus a live call each week where Phil breaks down real lots and takes questions.
For people who want to work more than one county with help from the United Tax Liens team.
At a county sale you can get in for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, depending on the state and the county. The kit itself is $17. Every county page it uses is free.
Phil buys in Florida, and the lots in the videos are Florida lots. The five checks work anywhere, because every county has a property page and a map. In states that sell liens instead of deeds, the list looks different. The checks are the same.
No. You do the five checks on the county's websites. Phil bids on lots he has never stood on.
About a minute after you order. It is on the next screen and in your email. Check your spam folder, and the promotions tab if you use Gmail.
Email support any time within 30 days and you get your $17 back. You keep the cheat sheet.
Most weekday mornings
"Run the check during the week. Bid from your kitchen table. Then go fishing. That is what I do most weekday mornings."Phil Kessler
Get Your First Lot Kit. Watch the videos. Run the cheat sheet on your own county's list. If it is not worth $17 to you, email support any time within 30 days. You get a full refund. You keep the cheat sheet either way.
We can do that because the five checks are on the county's own public pages. Once you have seen which five, you cannot unsee them.
GET YOUR FIRST LOT KIT - $17 →