Understanding how the county manages property data and delinquency data is an important and necessary skill to acquire.

Here is a list of delinquent tax reporting formats you may encounter, especially if they were filed electronically. Either by email or Internet downloads. This is important as it will be your guide at the beginning of your tax lien investing journey. You cannot go your way without understanding the following:

1.) The Microsoft Excel file format, also known as .xls or .xlsx, is a spreadsheet application, featuring calculation tools, charts, and pivot tables. It is overwhelmingly the dominant spreadsheet application available and is probably the easiest data program to work with and learn. One cell in a worksheet and it looks much more organized separates each field. I would say that the average county will be able to provide you with their data in an excel format upon request.

2.) The Comma Delimited File Format is a text file format that opens in Microsoft Word or Notepad. It looks like a set of terms separated by a comma, from left to right. Each property is in a row. It can literally look like this: parcel number, comma, space, last name, comma, space, first name, comma, space, legal description, comma, space, owner mailing address, comma space, city, comma, space, state, comma, space, zip code, comma, space. Then maybe assessed value, comma and space; so maybe they even use codes, comma, space.

The beauty of this format is that you can also open it with Microsoft Excel. All you would have to do is open it within the program by selecting file, open and then navigate to where this comma delimited file is located and load it from there. Microsoft will know what you are uploading. It will give you a little wizard that goes through all the necessary steps to open the file with you. After opening the file, all you have to do is save it as an Excel file for easy access to your report.

3.) CSV file = this stands for comma separated values ​​file in ASCII format. Contains all metadata and point identification information collected during point count. You can also save this in Microsoft Excel just like the comma delimited file.

4.) Microsoft Access is a relational database management system from Microsoft that combines the Microsoft Jet relational database with a graphical user interface and software development tools. The standard file extensions for these types of files are .mdb or .accdb. With this program, you can generate reporting tools for each of your potential investment properties. This can be useful if you want to attach copies of the plans or photos to your registrar’s investment opportunities. Another great feature of MS Access is that you can create and save custom queries so that whenever you import a new table of data into the file you can use the saved queries to filter the list.

5.) PDF Format=Portable Document Format. It is designed to make it easy to share documents on the Internet and to make it easy to print documents. It is not supported for transfer in Excel, at least you have a third party program that converts .pdf files to .xls files. When dealing with county data, stay away from these files. Chances are that even though the county has pdf reports readily available to the public, they also have a way to send you the data in a more convenient format. So make sure you talk to the right person.

6.) Cartridge = This is usually the oldest format a county will give you. This is basically similar to a floppy disk. It is stored on a real multimedia tape and its extraction would require a special program. If this is the only report file format available to your county recorder, don’t worry, as there are now ways to easily extract information from these. You can find companies that specialize in these types of conversions, and although it is complicated to process, the end result will be a gold mine because you are probably the only investor who took the time to convert this data.

Obtaining information from the county office is vital to your tax delinquent investment. They will give you a summary list of property availability in the county in which you wish to invest. These reports are great and absolutely necessary, but knowing how to process and read them is just as important. So always remember to ask the county for a database schema, data dictionary, or list of field definitions. Now that you know what to do with the different file formats currently available and used by most counties in the United States, you can now choose which format is best for you and your tax delinquent investment business.