You may be planning to invest in tax lien certificates and you are trying to decide what to do first. If you live in Martin County, you should plan on going down to the office of the martin county tax collector, and purchase a list of properties that will be offered for sale . In all states, a requirement is that these properties be published in the papers prior to the sale. The listing you purchase will be small or large depending on whether the sale is held by a municipality of by a county.

This list can be bought or you can get it for free, and they will have varying amounts of information in them. The free lists will only have the parcel number, lot number, and tax owed amount on them, whereas the purchased list will contain more of the types of information that you will need to conduct a proper research. It will in addition have the property address, if the property is still in a mortgage or not, the property type, and other details. If you get a free list and want more information, you must research the tax collector's records for the needed information.

A good way to approach the research would be to only buy the small lists. Because the process of looking for more information takes a great deal of time, it may not be cost effective. The cost of a list of about 500 properties may set you back about $50, and about $100 for a list of 1000 properties. With the larger lists, you could get them free, and then research the properties that you are want, instead of paying the hefty price for a more detailed list.

However, it is important to note that an even better way to approach the handling of the list may be to buy an updated list 4 of 5 days before a tax sale. What happens to the original list of say 1000 properties is that, perhaps 500 of the properties listed may not be offered on the saleday, and if you had spent time researching dropped properties then you would have been wasting a lot of your time.