If you are thinking of investing in some tax lien certificates, then in order to know which properties are going to be sold in the tax sale, you will have to get a list of those properties. If you are interested in Osceola County, you will be able to purchase such a list from the osceola county tax collector. Although it varies with the States, the properties by law must first be posted in the local papers a few weeks prior they are offered in a tax sale. The number of properties on a list will depend on if the tax sale is being put on by a county or by a municipality. The lists of municipality tax sales are smaller than those of county tax sale.

Not all lists are the same. Some of them are free and others you will have to pay for. The free lists provide only a limited amount of information such as the parcel number and tax id number, and property tax owed. You may want to know other pieces of information such as the property address, whether the house is under a mortgage, the prior sale price, the property acreage, to name only a few additional pieces of information. Basically, there are two ways for you to obtain this additional information. You could go down to the tax collector's office, and sift through the records, or you can purchase a list which will provide the information.

It may be prudent to buy a small list that contains all the additional information that you require. To be looking through records for the additional information can take up a lot of time and energy. If you buy a list of just 500 properties the cost could be about $50, and if the list contains 1000 properties, you may have to put out about $100. This is a lot of money to invest in a list, so a wise approach, with a large list, would be to attempt to do some research yourself to get the additional information you need.

Even better that that, you may wait until 4 of 5 daysprior to the tax sale you are planning to attend and then purchase an updated list. There is good reason to take this approach. With an initial list of properties, only half the properties listed will eventually be offered at a tax sale. So you could have been wasting your time if you were researching those properties that were not still on the listing, on the day of the tax sale. But if you purchase a revised list, a few days prior to the tax sale, and restrict your search to a small area and to only a specific type of property, then your time will be spent more productively.