Tax deed sales, before the gavel.

A tax deed sale is a public auction at which a county sells real property to recover property taxes left unpaid. In Florida it follows a tax certificate: an investor pays the overdue tax, and two years later may apply for a tax deed, which puts the parcel up for auction by the clerk of court. The published notice of that application is the public record that the sale is coming.

From the published notices. We read every notice of application for tax deed that Florida papers publish to floridapublicnotices.com, plus Jefferson County, Kentucky's commissioner sale list, every night. We hold 2,504 notices describing 2,459 sales in 41 counties.

A notice runs once a week for four weeks, and a parcel with more than one tax certificate gets a notice for each. We merge them into one sale per parcel, keep the newest published date, and link every notice behind it from the record -- so the counts on this site are sales, not printings.

Nothing, during early access. A free account opens everything — the opening bid, owner, certificate holder, legal description and auction link on every sale, saved-search alerts and CSV export. When paid plans start, the first 30 accounts pay $19 a month for their first 3 months. Parcel number, county and sale date are public on every page.

Parcel-level sales in Florida and Kentucky. The auction calendar adds 223 county sales announced across 22 states, and the California default lists add 621 tax-defaulted parcels -- each on its own page, never counted as a sale.