Teacher - Real Estate Investor: How I made $175K from $3K tax lien
I’m a school teacher, a mother, and a GiGi, and I flip houses... with my son, my daughter, and my best friend. Here is a link to my story. I will summarize it for you so you can see that you can do it too! I was out driving and saw a vacant and abandoned house in a very nice neighborhood. That house happened to be owned by a company, so that was pretty much a dead end, but I noticed they owned it because it was sold as a tax lien (all public records on line). I looked up the name of the person who stopped paying taxes and found that he had A LOT of property... Sometimes he paid the taxes, sometimes he did not. I started sifting through what he didn't pay (again, all online public records) and found one that looked interesting. Long story short (which you can see on YouTube) I bought this one for a little over $3000, renovated it and used it as an AirBnB while I waited for the tax deed to allow me to quiet the title. Once I quieted the title, I had a free and clear property because Airbnb had more than covered everything I put in it, worth $175,000. I did all this while working as a full-time teacher, and it was simply reading books about real estate, watching podcasts, doing research on YouTube, and going to local real estate meetings. Time was invested, but no money was invested in learning. And that's not the only strategy I have learned since I started getting interested in real estate in 2018. This is something anyone can do. Will you find a needle in a hay stack like I did? Maybe not, but if that mindset kept me from starting, I wouldn't have either.