Obtaining the list of properties to be offered in a property tax sale is the first thing to do once you decide to make an investment in tax lien certificates. If your focus is Walton County, Florida, you should get a list compiled by the walton county tax collector office. In some states, it is required that these lists be printed in the local newspapers a few weeks before the actual tax sale. Usually if a municipality is holding a tax sale, the list would be small, and if a county is holding the sale, the lists will be bigger.

The list of properties up for auction could be obtained free of charge, but they are unlikely to have certain additional information you may on the property. When the listing is obtained freely, the information usually only contains the amount of property tax owed, the block and lot numbers, ant the tax id or parcel number. You may want information on the type of property it is, the acreage, the last sale price, the physical address of the property, and whether still under a mortgage. Visiting a tax collector's office will allow you to get this additional information by looking it up yourself, or you may purchase a list that includes the additional information.

A good approach to take would be to spend the money to purchase a small list. Personally looking through records to obtain the additional details is very time consuming and not cost effective. It would cost about $50 to buy a list with 500 properties up for auction, and over $100 to buy a list with about 1000 properties. Where the larger lists are concerned, you are well advised to do the research yourself to obtain the additional information, and not pay the large fee to have the research completed for you.

An even a better way would be to not buy a list until the last 4 or 5 days before the tax sale date. This a better way because, in the list of 1000 only 500 may eventually end up at the tax sale, so had you purchased the list you may have been researching properties that would have been dropped from the list. By purchasing a revised list in the last few days like this, and limiting yourresearch to a specific area, and to specific types of properties, you will be spending your time more productively.