How LienToDeed works — and how you can check our work

Tax sale investing runs on public records and state statutes. Our job is to watch both, carefully, and to show our work. This page explains exactly where our information comes from, how it's verified, how our scores and max bids are produced, and what we do when we get something wrong.

1. Our sources

Sale listings. Every property listing on LienToDeed originates from a list published by a county clerk of court, a county tax collector, or the official sale platform a county has designated to display its published list. We do not buy scraped lists from data brokers, and we never treat a search-engine snippet, a forum post, or a third-party blog as a source for a listing.

State laws. Every rule in our state law library — sale type, interest or penalty cap, redemption window, sale timing, process — is taken from the governing statute or an official county/state publication, and each law page carries its citations and a "last verified" date. Where sources conflicted, we followed the primary source (for example, Illinois' current penalty cap of 9% per six months under 35 ILCS 200/21-215, not the outdated 18% figure still circulating in older guides).

What we don't use. We do not currently license bulk property-data feeds, and we say so: where a published list doesn't include a field — an assessed value, an address, a property type — the field is missing from our alert too, labeled as such, never filled in from an unverified source.

2. Verification steps (verify before alert)

A listing must pass these steps before it can generate an alert:

1. Published-list capture. The county's published list is fetched from its official source. If a source is unreachable or its format changes, that source is paused — never guessed at.
2. Normalization. Listings are matched to parcels by the identifiers the list itself publishes (parcel ID and/or case number).
3. Diffing. Each new list is compared against the previous one. New listings, changed listings, and withdrawn listings (redeemed, corrected, or pulled) are all recorded — a disappearance is treated as information, not silently dropped.
4. Field-level honesty check. A max bid can only be computed when the published record includes an assessed value. If it doesn't, the listing can still be scored and digested — but it cannot carry a max bid, and it cannot trigger an instant alert.
5. Human-auditable trail. Every alert can be traced back to the published list it came from, with the source named on the alert itself.

3. How scoring works

Each listing's score (0–100) is computed from transparent, checkable inputs:

• Taxes owed vs. published assessed value — the economics of the position, when the value is published.
• Property type — as published on the list.
• Time to sale — nearer sales score for urgency of research, not for hype.
• State rules — the rate cap, redemption window, and sale format from our sourced law library.

The inputs are stored with the score. We don't publish a score we can't decompose.

Max bids and max rates. When a verified assessed value exists, a deed listing's max bid is shown as 65% of assessed value, labeled "Estimate." It is a starting discipline, not an appraisal and not a recommendation. Lien listings show the state's statutory structure (cap, bid-down mechanics) rather than an invented "expected rate." Listings without a published value show no max bid at all — a deliberate gap we consider a feature.

Alert policy. A listing triggers an instant text + email alert only when it scores at or above our quality threshold and carries a supported max bid. Everything else arrives in a daily digest. Withdrawals of listings you've been alerted to generate their own notice. Free accounts receive the calendar and law library; alerts are the paid layer (Bidder $49/mo for one state, Pro $99/mo nationwide).

4. Refresh cadence

• Counties with a sale inside 14 days are re-checked hourly.
• All other tracked counties are re-checked daily.
• State law pages are re-verified on a rolling review and immediately when we learn of a statutory change (for example, Louisiana's legislated move to a lien system effective January 1, 2026 — our library reflects it with its source).
• Calendar entries are seeded and maintained only from verified published sources — never from estimated sale dates.

5. Corrections policy

We will be wrong sometimes; what matters is what happens next.

• Spotted an error? Every page and alert links back to its source so you can check us. Report a discrepancy from any page's contact route and we will re-verify against the primary source.
• Confirmed errors are corrected at the source (the law page, the listing, the score inputs), not just patched in one place, and affected alerts are re-issued as corrections — including to members who received the original.
• Material corrections are noted on the page with the date of the fix. We don't silently rewrite history.
• If a county's data proves unreliable, we pause that county's alerts and label its pages "being verified" rather than publish data we can't stand behind. Several counties carry that label today, on purpose.

6. What LienToDeed is not

We are an information and alerting service. We are not a law firm, a broker, an auction platform, or an investment adviser. Nothing here — including scores and max bids — is legal, tax, or investment advice, or a recommendation to buy any specific property. Tax sales are governed by state law and county procedure; always confirm sale details with the county before bidding, and consult qualified professionals about your own situation.

Methodology version: 1.0 — published with the service's launch build (2026-10-30). Substantive changes to scoring or sourcing will be versioned and noted here.