Frequently asked questions

A tax lien is a claim placed on a property when the owner doesn't pay property taxes — investors who buy the lien collect interest until the owner pays it off (or get the property if they don't). A tax deed is the actual sale of the property itself, usually after taxes go unpaid long enough that the county auctions the property outright. LienScout Pro covers both types of sales.

LienScout Pro covers 25 counties across five states: Florida, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, and California. Those five states account for a disproportionate share of U.S. tax lien and tax deed volume, and the 25 counties inside them are the highest-activity markets in each — Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Hillsborough, Duval, and Orange in Florida; Fulton, DeKalb, Gwinnett, Cobb, and Chatham in Georgia; Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, Bexar, Travis, and Collin in Texas; Maricopa, Pima, and Pinal in Arizona; and Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino in California. We deliberately trade national breadth for depth. Rather than listing thin auction data for 3,000+ counties, each covered county is wired to its own tax collector, assessor, clerk, and recorder sources, plus city-level permit and code-enforcement portals, so risk enrichment is real rather than inferred. New counties are added based on subscriber demand and on whether the county publishes data we can verify — a county only goes live once its sale calendar, parcel data, and at least one recorded-lien or code-violation source are all confirmed working.

Auction data is refreshed on a cadence matched to each county's official publishing schedule. Counties that post daily updates — most RealAuction-hosted Florida and Texas sales — are scraped daily, and several are polled multiple times per day as a sale date approaches. Counties that publish a list once per sale cycle are checked on that cycle, plus a sweep as soon as the list is expected to drop. Every record carries the timestamp of the last successful pull from the county, so you always see the age of what you're looking at instead of guessing. We also run a change-detection pass that compares each new pull against the prior one and flags properties whose auction date moved, whose status changed to cancelled or redeemed, or that were pulled from the list entirely — reschedules are surfaced directly on the auction row. Data comes from the county portals themselves, so when the county changes something, our copy changes with it.

All auction and risk data comes from official county sources: the tax collector, assessor, treasurer, clerk, and recorder offices. We cross-reference with Zillow, Realtor, and Redfin for property context, but never treat those as the source of truth.

Code violation liens, municipal assessments, FEMA flood zones (including AE, X, and repeat loss areas), legal road access, landlocked parcels, mortgage and other recorded liens, and other encumbrances that can survive a tax sale and become the new owner's problem.

No. The platform is built so that risk is obvious at a glance even if this is your first auction. Every property carries a deal score with the reasoning shown underneath it — the equity estimate, the recorded liens we found, flood and wetland exposure, legal access, open permits, and code enforcement history are each listed as their own line item rather than buried in a single number. If a factor lowered the score, you can see which one and by how much. Beyond the product, the Research Library includes state-by-state guides covering how auctions run in Florida, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, and California, what the redemption periods and statutory interest rates are in each, how deeds are conveyed, and what a first-time bidder needs to register. New investors typically use the platform in reverse of what they expect: instead of hunting for deals, they use it to eliminate the majority of a county's list quickly and spend their remaining time on the handful of parcels that survive screening.

LienScout Pro starts with a 14-day free trial that requires no credit card, so you can work a real auction list before deciding. After the trial, plans are tiered primarily by how many states you want active at once — a single-state plan for investors focused on one market, and higher tiers for investors bidding across multiple states, with the top tier unlocking every covered state plus the heavier research and export tooling. All plans include the same underlying risk enrichment: recorded liens, code violations, FEMA flood zones, wetlands, legal access, equity estimates, and the deal score. Subscriptions are month-to-month with no setup fee, no per-seat surcharge, and no charge for the data pulls themselves. Current pricing for each tier is listed on our pricing page, which is the authoritative source since plan limits change as new counties come online.

Yes. You can cancel your trial or your paid subscription at any time from your account settings — there is no phone call, no retention queue, and no cancellation fee. If you cancel during the 14-day trial you are never charged, because no card is required to start. If you cancel a paid plan, your access continues through the end of the billing period you already paid for, and the subscription simply does not renew; we do not prorate a partial month back, and we do not bill again after cancellation. Watchlists, saved searches, notes, and worksheets stay in your account, so if you come back for a later auction season everything you built is still there. When you cancel we ask a short optional question about why, which is genuinely used to prioritize what we build next.

Yes — we offer a Data Accuracy Guarantee. If we miss a major recorded lien or active code violation on a tax sale property in our covered counties, we'll refund your subscription. Full terms in our Terms of Service.

It depends on the state and the type of lien. Some liens (such as IRS liens and certain municipal liens) survive a tax deed sale and become the new owner's responsibility. LienScout Pro flags these so you don't get surprised after you buy. We always recommend a final title check before bidding.

Most platforms help you find more deals. LienScout Pro is risk-first — we focus on helping you eliminate the deals that look good but would actually cost you money. We trade national breadth for depth: 25 high-activity counties with deep risk enrichment, rather than thin coverage of the 3,000+ counties in the U.S.

Yes. Every count on the homepage — active properties, upcoming auctions, counties live, and enrichment coverage — is queried from our production database when the page loads, not typed into the design. If a county cancels a sale overnight, the auction count on the homepage drops the next time it is loaded. We deliberately show live numbers rather than rounded marketing figures because the same policy governs the product: where a data point is missing for a parcel, we display it as unknown rather than substituting a zero or an estimate. That means the homepage counts sometimes go down, and that is the point — a platform that only ever shows growth is showing you a graphic, not a database. If you want to verify, the same figures appear inside the app on the coverage and county pages, broken out per county with the timestamp of the last successful data pull from that county's official source.

Yes. Every parcel in our covered Florida and Georgia counties is screened against the USFWS National Wetlands Inventory and state environmental overlays (Florida DEP, Georgia DNR). We report wetland type, percent overlap, and shadow-score the deal so wetland-encumbered parcels don't blindside your bid. Texas and Arizona coverage is expanding.

We check every parcel against road network, right-of-way, and easement data and flag landlocked or no-legal-access lots directly on the auction row. As of our July 2026 competitive audit, LienScout Pro is the only platform in the tax-sale category that surfaces this risk.

Yes. City-level enrichers pull open building permits (including unpaid permit fees), code enforcement cases, and 311 complaint signals from Accela, Tyler EnerGov, ArcGIS Hub, and Socrata portals across our covered metros — Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Houston, Dallas, LA, Phoenix, Atlanta, and dozens more. Lien-eligible findings feed the hidden-risk penalty on the deal score.

Yes. Won liens get a redemption watcher that models each state's statute — interest rates, penalty tiers, cure windows, and deed-application windows. You'll see countdowns for the exact date you can apply for a deed and alerts before your certificate is about to expire.

Yes. Any property on your watchlist or portfolio fires a 30-day, 7-day, and 1-day reminder before the sale, honored per your notification preferences. Reminders are deduplicated per bucket, so you'll never get the same countdown twice.