Do older tax delinquencies sell better than new ones?

Tax delinquency is one of the oldest lists in the business, and the advice on it splits two ways. One camp says the longer an owner is behind, the closer they are to losing the house, so mail the oldest debt first. The other says owners who've been behind for years have learned to live with it, so mail the newer ones.

Both camps are right somewhere. The county decides which.

Houston and Dallas point opposite ways

In Harris County, TX, about 2.8 of every 100 owners two to four years behind on their taxes sold off-market within 12 months, against about 2.1 of every 100 owners five or more years behind over the same 12 months.

A few hours north, Dallas County, TX went the other way. About 6.6 of every 100 owners five or more years behind sold off-market within 12 months, against about 3.9 of every 100 owners two to four years behind. Both Dallas lists are big, 9,369 and 29,082 owners, so this isn't a handful of sales tipping the scale.

Across the 101 counties where we could measure both lists, owners five or more years behind sold off-market more often within 12 months in 63, and owners two to four years behind did in 38. That leans toward older debt, but it's far from a rule. In half the counties in the table above, following it would have meant mailing the weaker list first.

Watch the list sizes too. Duval County, FL has only 348 owners five or more years behind, and 26 of them sold off-market within 12 months. A list that small can flip with a few sales, so recount it every year.

One likely reason the pattern changes: the rules for when a county can sell a house for back taxes vary a lot by state, and so does how long an owner can stay behind before anything happens. The records show the outcome either way.

Either way, it's one of the stronger lists

Which tax years to mail first is a sorting question. Whether to mail the list at all is easier. Owners two to four years behind sold off-market less often than a random house in only 10 of 275 counties measured, over 12 months. Owners five or more years behind fell below it in only 5 of 163.

Compare that with owners 65 and older living elsewhere, who fell below the random house in 343 of 384 counties. Should I mail absentee owners over 65 has that table.

How to sort your county's list

1. Get the delinquent list from your county tax collector or treasurer. Many publish it; some sell it.
2. Split the owners by how many years they've been behind: two to four years in one group, five or more in another.
3. Pull the deeds recorded in your county over the last year and keep the arm's-length sales that never went through a listing.
4. For each group, count how many of those houses were on it, divide by the owners in the group and multiply by 100.
5. Do the same for every house in the county. Mail the group that sold more first, and keep any group that beats the county line.

Or skip the spreadsheet. The free county read runs this count for your county from the county's own records.

For clients, we rank tax delinquent owners against what actually sold off-market in their own county, so the tax years that sold there get mailed first. How it works shows the weekly build. For the rest of the scoreboard, see which motivated seller lists actually sell, and for timing, when to mail each list.

How we counted

We counted every off-market, arm's-length sale recorded in each county over 12 months and checked which list each house was on before it sold. A house picked at random is every single-family house in the county, over the same 12 months.

Every number here is counted from the county's own records. The numbers were counted by FirstPulse, the data engine GoForClose runs on.