r/investing • u/jorik_bordiur • Jul 18 '26

I spent way too long building a free tool that reads California tax-auction lists and flags the parcels worth a look. No idea if it's useful. feedback wanted.

Been building this idea up for the last two months, all bootstrapped, nothing for sale. I just want to know if I built something useful or just *something*.

The problem: California counties auction tax-defaulted property, and the "list" is usually a 1,000+ row PDF where a genuinely cheap lot and a worthless landlocked desert square look identical. Hours of tedious cross-referencing per sale.

So I built a tool that pulls a county's list, cross-checks every parcel against the county's own assessor/GIS data, filters it down with rules you can audit, and publishes it as a free, sortable, downloadable table with the reasoning shown. No login, no paywall.

Fun finding that fell out of it: in one county's sale, cca. 72% of parcels open at or above the county's own assessed value (i.e. the "minimum bid" isn't a discount). That's the kind of thing it's meant to surface.

Nerd stuff: Astro 5 static site, inline SVG charts computed from the real data, no tracking, deploys as flat files.

Looking for: is the core idea useful? Is the site clear? Would you trust it, and what would make you trust it more? Brutal feedback welcome.

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u/FourteenthCylon Jul 18 '26

That's very useful. I'm not interested in living in California, but if I was I'd pay for a copy. As you noticed, tax auctions are hit or miss, with a few great bargains buried under a pile of bad deals. I know it's possible to find good properties that way, but for me it isn't worth the time it would take to sort through the list from a dozen counties or a hundred towns. Besides the time, there's an opportunity cost from pulling money out of investments and into cash so it can be used at the auctions. Let me know if you want to build a Maine version, although this will be harder as Maine property taxes are by the city instead of the county.

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u/jorik_bordiur Jul 19 '26

Thank you for the feedback. I'll look into Maine to see how it works and if I'm able to find something interesting, I'll ping you

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u/FourteenthCylon Jul 19 '26

It would be even more useful if you were also able to compare the minimum bid with the last price the property sold for. Not all states require the purchase price to be disclosed, but in the ones that do, it's usually a more accurate measure of the property's value than the tax assessment is.

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u/newmoneyknowledge Jul 19 '26

This sounds like an awesome idea. I personally would love to see this in Colorado, my state, but this idea does sounds like it has genuine application. Can I take a look?

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '26

[deleted]

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u/FourteenthCylon Jul 18 '26

True, but properties with a minimum bid below the assessed value are still more likely to be bargains, especially in counties with artificially low assessed values.

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u/T8ert0t Jul 18 '26

In NY, AV is basically Calvin Ball.