HometownGeorgetown.com

On Tuesday, I went with a couple of friends to the monthly foreclosure sale and tax sale on the steps of the Williamson county courthouse at the corner of Martin Luther King Boulevard and 4th Street in Georgetown. I had never been to one of these sales, so I wanted to see what it was all about. There were a far greater number of bank foreclosures than there were properties on the tax sale list, and all but three or four of the tax sales had been withdrawn by the time of the sale. Only one of the tax sale properties was bid upon, and there were three bidders vying for it. It was a property in Taylor, which I assume was a small house. The minimum bid was $2,500; it sold for $10,800. Everyone who planned to bid had to pre-register, and the winning bidder was required to bring cash or a cashier’s check within an hour or so. This is not something you can do spur-of-the-moment. For more information on Williamson County tax sales, click here and scroll down to Delinquent Tax Sales.

 The bank foreclosure sale ran concurrently, so it was impossible to follow all the sales of the day. When you get to the courthouse steps, you can pick up a list of all of the properties that could potentially be on the block. (Property owners often manage to delay or stop foreclosure prior to the sale on the courthouse steps, so many of the properties are no longer available for sale.) There are people there who work as trustees on the loans, and each of them had a number of properties offered for sale. For each property, they read statutory language, and then opened bidding. Unfortunately, I was only able to follow the sale of one of these properties. It was a house in Leander with an appraised value of about $108,000. Bidding from “the government” started at just over $84,000. I don’t know what branch of the government bid on this. I wonder if this had something to do with the bailout package recently announced. No one else bid, so the government got the property for 80% of its assessed value. Not too shabby. Anyone who bids in this sale must also have cash or cashier’s check at the ready.

I still don’t know a lot about the foreclosure process, but it does seem like someone with cash to invest could do very well in today’s market, building an empire for the future. Of course, there are a lot of pre-foreclosure properties on the market now, too, and you can get a great deal on them without having to bring $100,000 cash to the courthouse.