If the federal tax liens are IRS they will expire off the property 120 days after the auction, unless they redeem before that. All this assumes they were notified of the foreclosure. If they redeem you get back your purchase price plus 6% interest per annum on your money.
State tax liens are PROBABLY wiped off the property, assuming they are junior to the loan foreclosing and assuming that the state was notified of the foreclosure sale. The way to verify this would be by calling the person/company handling the sale or else calling the state agency that has the lien.
When I first ran across this lead, as I was reading the NOD, I noticed that no payments had been made since the owner of the TD bought it in 1999. I spent an hour and a half on the phone with this guy yesterday, and it turns out that he bought the note with 2 partners who were all old friends of the homeowner. The homeowner started having financial issues in the ?90s when a major commercial RE project went sour, and he got stuck holding the bag. So these 3 guys bought the TD from the bank to help their old friend keep afloat. In addition, there are apparently a number of tax liens (Fed and State) and the 3 amigos have only been paying the property current enough to keep the county at bay.
A couple of years ago they filed Chap 7, (now discharged). Hopefully that got rid of most if not all the unseen issues. I don?t think it got rid of the tax liens, however. I understand that a foreclosure would though. To top it all off, the owner passed away a couple of weeks ago.
To make a long story short, the deal is not quite as sweet as I was hoping, but the guy who owns the TD is still interested doing something. He said that they have roughly 185k into the deal all told, and their opening bid at the auction will be 265k. The down side is that unfortunately, I can?t comfortably make the debt service on that size of a mortgage to live in myself. The up side is that if I can grab it for the full 265k, there is plenty of equity to flip it for a nice profit.
My biggest fear is those tax liens?..anyone have any expertise there?
Thanks to Ron Starr and JT-IN for their previous input.