subject: Tax Deed Overages - If You Don't Know The Term, You're Making $100,000 Less Than You Could Be [print this page] "Tax deed overages." Chances are you've never heard of that phrase in your life, even if you are a real estate investor. Most investors, even tax sale investors, never stumble across tax deed overages. But the ones that do are quietly cleaning up with them - making $100,000 or much more, depending on the person.
Tax deed overages are the funds that are left over when a bidder bids more than the amount of taxes owed on a property at tax sale. These funds range anywhere from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand dollars. They are generally held for the tax delinquent owner to collect for a period of time, after which the government can seize the money. These funds all have one thing in common: their owners seem to be clueless about their existence. So they sit, and they escheat to the government by the millions.
If that's not enough to excite you, how about this? Due to a legal loophole, these overages are (generally) not governed by finder's fee limits. This means that if you connect the owners with their funds, you can legally charge whatever you want as a finder's fee. Since these owners are almost always completely clueless about where they could have a windfall coming from (for a variety of totally understandable reasons), they're also generally happy to agree to a 50% finder's fee.
That means on a property overage of $20,000, you'll make $10,000. You could easily make that $10,000 for less than a day's worth of work, when all is said and done.
To top it all off, you're probably aware of the skyrocketing foreclosure rate. This ensures that tax overages (as well as mortgage foreclosure overages) will continue to be created, and lost to the government if someone doesn't step in as "finder." There's never been a better time to get involved, and you could feasibly add $100,000 to your income in whatever time you have available to dedicate to the business.
