Warren County: Scrape and Store Tax Lien information

[ludstuen90]

Tax lien information is stored on a different site. (Fidlar). Engineer a process to access this site, scrape this information, and store it as well.

"You can see here from the screen shot, the lien is the "consideration", recorded date is the date_of_mortgage, etc."

[ludstuen90]

@walinchus In parsing the tax liens: It looks like if we're trying to figure out if a tax lien has been issued, we could do the following:

• Look for a record: with a document type 'MTG' and where Party 1 name matches owner name
• date_of_mortgage = date recorded
• mortgage_amount = consideration
• tax_lien = True if we find records on this page, false otherwise? (IE. If a user has an outstanding mortgage, they will have a tax lien)

Questions:

• How would we know if a mortgage has been paid off/Tax lien removed? (Maybe we don't care about this so much as knowing whether a current owner has ever had a tax lien in place)

[walinchus]

Well they are both important data points but for different stories.

A mortgage is a private lien on a house, a tax lien is a government security.

So let’s say you buy Apartments LLC at 123 Main Street. The bank will lend you $100 million, but if you fail to pay back that money, they, at the very least, want that property back so they can sell to someone else and at least recoup their losses. So they record a lien on the property. Which is like a paper the government keeps with that property file. If you want to buy Apartments LLC, you will look at all rights to that property, because in a sale they have first legal dibs at the proceeds.

A tax lien is just a security that the government puts on the property for failing to pay taxes. That can happen with or without a mortgage. That means if you sell the property for $100k and owe $5K in taxes, the government will get the tax money first. (Note: all tax liens supercede private liens, aka they get paid first, for obvious reasons. They write the laws😂)

Land banks have the power to erase all tax liens, which is what makes them so attractive and which is why they are a potential abuse of power.

Mortgage liens grossly out of whack with their tax assessments will in theory be able to point us to the really overvalued LLCs. For example, that building I mentioned in Athens- it’s on the books for $12 million, as it hasn’t sold in a while, maybe 20 years. But an appraiser valued it at $45 million.

On Nov 21, 2018, at 6:11 PM, Lukas Udstuen notifications@github.com wrote:

@walinchus In parsing the tax liens: It looks like if we're trying to figure out if a tax lien has been issued, we could do the following:

Look for a record: with a document type 'MTG' and where Party 1 name matches owner name date_of_mortgage = date recorded mortgage_amount = consideration tax_lien = True if we find records on this page, false otherwise? (IE. If a user has an outstanding mortgage, they will have a tax lien) Questions:

How would we know if a mortgage has been paid off/Tax lien removed? (Maybe we don't care about this so much as knowing whether a current owner has ever had a tax lien in place) — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

[ludstuen90]

@walinchus Right on! That makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.

Example parcel: https://oh3laredo.fidlar.com/OHWarren/AvaWeb/#!/search?Parcel=0801219020

In order to find the mortgage information:

• For the mortgage and date_of_mortgage fields, are we OK saying these fields represent the most recent mortgage recorded? I'm trying to think of a situation where someone might have multiple mortgages... or might have paid off a mortgage.

Do you see any property that has a tax lien? I haven't seen any field yet that seems to clearly indicate whether a tax lien is in place or not,

[walinchus]

So this is interesting. Here is the list of most recent property sales: http://wcsooh.org/SheriffSales/slsgrid.aspx

These are both tax liens and regular foreclosures. When the United States the plaintiff, you would think that would be a tax lien, it gives the amount owed but it doesn't say delinquent.

When Ohio is the plaintiff (Warren County Treasurer), Then it does say delinquent.

Here's an example of a property with delinquent taxes: http://www.co.warren.oh.us/property_search/summary.aspx?account_nbr=2118424

So I will call tomorrow and see how we can get federal liens as well. Though logistically, if you aren't paying your property tax, that's going to be the larger lien. You would probably be delinquent on both, too if you aren't going to pay.

[ludstuen90]

@walinchus Got it! Does that mean if a property appears on this page http://wcsooh.org/SheriffSales/slsgrid.aspx, and a property has Warren County Treasurer as the plaintiff, then this represents a county tax lien ?

And we're still investigating whether when it says Plaintiff is Federal Government (IE: Fannie Mae) that that represents a federal tax lien?

[walinchus]

I talked to the sheriff's office. The federal government as the plaintiff actually does not mean it's a tax lien, that just means it's a mortgage owned by the federal government (yes right like Fannie Mae.)

The problem, though is that the sheriff's office doesn't have a definitive list of tax liens, just the ones for sale currently. But we should be able to see under where it say "delinquent" for how much tax is owed.

[ludstuen90]

Got it! Hmm. So maybe instead of a "tax lien" boolean we store the delinquent on taxes amount? If we're trying to find properties that would have tax-bills lucrative to wipe out, that could get us close, no?

[walinchus]

Yes that would be good.

[ludstuen90]

Right on! How about this:

• I'll make the change first for Cuyahoga county (if possible), so that way we can implement before scrape Cuyahoga
• Then, go back to make the change for Warren County so if we want to re-run the scraper, it would fill in then.

[ludstuen90]

We're focusing on bigger counties now; this needs to be done for Warren County, but will be marked as an enhancement.