If you invest in Massachusetts tax titles, you already know the frustration. There is no season to plan around. A treasurer in one town schedules an auction in March, a collector two towns over holds one in October, and half the lists are a PDF posted on a municipal website you have to remember to check. Meanwhile, some of the biggest tax sales in the country run every year in November and December, in states most Boston investors never look at. This winter, it is worth looking.

Massachusetts plays a different game

Massachusetts does not sell tax lien certificates the way most states do. Under Chapter 60, the city or town takes or sells a tax title, and that title can be assigned at public auction for at least the redemption amount. What you hold is a redeemable deed position: the owner can redeem at any time before you file a foreclosure petition in Land Court, and for titles taken or sold on or after November 1, 2024, you generally cannot file that petition until 12 months have passed.

The 2024 reforms changed the math in ways a lot of investors have not caught up with. Interest on newer tax titles is 8% per year, not the 16% that most national directories still print. The older titles keep their 16% rate and shorter wait, which means two properties on the same street can sit under different rules depending on when the title was taken. If your underwriting still assumes 16% and six months, you are working from a stale playbook.

None of this makes Massachusetts a bad market. It makes it a slow, local, relationship-driven one, where deal flow depends on which town happens to be selling this month. That is exactly why out-of-state sales deserve a place on your calendar: while Massachusetts deal flow idles, other states are running lists with thousands of properties on fixed, published dates.

Lien states and deed states run on a calendar

In a lien state, you are buying the debt. The county sells certificates against delinquent taxes, your return comes from interest and penalties if the owner redeems, and in many states you can move toward the deed if they do not. Colorado is the classic example, and its big county sales land in the fall.

In a deed state, you are buying the property itself at auction, usually subject to whatever redemption right that state gives the former owner afterward. South Carolina sells this way every fall and winter, and its county lists are some of the largest published anywhere.

The practical difference for a remote investor is timing. These sales are scheduled months ahead, the lists are published before the sale, and registration is usually open to out-of-state buyers. The work is in the screening, not in finding the sale.

How to read a published list without fooling yourself

A county sale list gives you a parcel number, an owner name, sometimes an address, an assessed value, and an amount due. New investors misread that last number constantly, so be clear on it: the amount due is the delinquent taxes, interest, and costs owed on the parcel. It is not the property’s value, and it is not a bargain signal by itself. In some states it is also the starting bid. In others, bidding opens there and runs up. A small tax bill can sit on a valuable property or on a landlocked strip worth nothing, and the list alone will not tell you which.
The assessed value matters more than most beginners realize. It is the county’s own published figure, imperfect but consistent, and it gives you an anchor for the one decision that keeps tax-sale buyers out of trouble: the most you will pay, decided before the auction starts, not during it.

Two more realities of published lists. First, they shrink. Owners pay up, enter payment plans, or redeem, and parcels get withdrawn right up to sale day. Screen the whole list, but expect a meaningful share of it to disappear. Second, the list is the county’s data, not a promise. Confirm anything you seriously intend to bid on with the county before money moves.

Screen like a pro: score the list, cap the bid

Working a list of two or three thousand parcels by hand is how investors end up bidding on the five properties they happened to read about instead of the five worth owning. The disciplined version of the process looks like this. Rank the list first, using the fields the county actually publishes: taxes owed against assessed value, property type, location inside the county. Then set a conservative ceiling for anything you would consider, as a fixed fraction of the assessed value, and treat that ceiling as a hard stop. A common discipline is to cap a bid at 65% of the published assessed value, which builds in room for the assessed figure to be optimistic and for the costs you cannot see yet. Finally, track what happens to your shortlist. Withdrawals and redemptions are information, and watching them cycle after cycle teaches you how a county’s list really behaves.

What is actually on the calendar right now

This is not theory. These are published sales with published lists, all in the next few weeks. Weld County, Colorado’s lien sale runs November 5 with 4,806 parcels on the list. Pueblo County, Colorado follows on November 9 with 3,211. South Carolina’s deed sales start the same day: Charleston County on November 9 with 1,174 parcels and Bamberg County with 724. The largest of the group, Horry County, South Carolina (the Myrtle Beach market), sells December 1 with 2,342 parcels. In total, there are more than 150 tax sales scheduled across 21 states between now and the end of December. An investor in Boston can research every one of those lists without leaving the desk.

The tool I built to do the screening

I got tired of downloading county PDFs and rebuilding the same spreadsheet every cycle, so I built LienToDeed to do the unglamorous part. It tracks published tax lien and tax deed sale lists nationwide (more than 57,000 properties on live lists right now, across 235 counties in 24 states), scores every parcel, and sends members one daily email with everything new in it, with the top matches, meaning parcels scoring 70 or better that carry a ceiling estimate, leading the email. That ceiling estimate is deliberately conservative: 65% of the county-published assessed value, shown only where the county actually publishes an assessed value. The national sale calendar and a guide to every state’s tax-sale laws are free on the site, whether you ever pay for anything or not.

Boston REIA members can look here: https://lientodeed.com/?ref=BOSTONREIA

Massachusetts will keep doing tax titles its own slow way, town by town. Nothing wrong with that. But the calendar does not stop at the state line, and this winter it is a busy one.

Ryan Bessette is the founder of LienToDeed, which tracks tax lien and tax deed sales nationwide.
Educational information only, not investment advice. Tax-sale rules vary by state and county and change over time. Always confirm sale details, amounts, and procedures with the county before bidding.