In the United States, owning a property is not a symbol of wealth. It is likely to be the beginning of a burden. You have to pay property taxes, insurance premiums, high labor maintenance costs, etc. for it.

Affected by the COVID-19 epidemic, the U.S. economy has been severely hit, but the residential real estate market is an exception. According to real estate agent and investor Huang Yongming, this is because there are many ways to buy and sell land in the United States, and everyone’s interest in land

Needs are not entirely affected by macroeconomic conditions.

Three years ago, Huang Yongming went to the United States to live and obtained a real estate agent's license in Texas. In his observation, since the United States mainly implements private ownership of land, the way of buying and selling land is completely different from that in China, and the reasons for buying land are also very different.

Among his clients, some people buy land to live in, and buy a piece of land they like while they are young, and keep it until they retire; some people buy land for hunting, and some people buy land to dig for underground treasures... You never know what to buy.

What is the value of this land?

Quan Now interviewed Huang Yongming and asked him to talk about the American real estate market in the eyes of Chinese people. The following is Huang Yongming’s self-report: I am an avid American TV series lover. In 2015, American TV series must be reviewed before broadcasting in China.

It will be delayed for 6 months before it can be played.

At that time, I thought, how can this work? I want to go directly to the United States to watch it.

Two years later, I flew from Beijing to Houston without any relatives or friends. I realized that this was an opportunity to start over in an unfamiliar society. How to survive in an unfamiliar system and build your financial security?

Suddenly I thought it was very interesting. It might be even more exciting than the American TV series.

My profession is real estate investment. I obtained a real estate broker's license in Texas, USA, and live in Houston.

Two companies are registered here, one is for real estate investment and the other is for investment training.

When it comes to real estate investment, people's first reaction or even their only reaction is to buy a house and wait for it to appreciate in value.

But the American approach is very different.

Because 70% of the land in the United States is privately owned, the buying and selling methods are very different from those in China.

What's more, I don't need particularly strong capital to engage in this investment.

You can even spend thousands of dollars to buy a piece of land just to tie up a few of your family's horses.

What I mainly do is tax lien investment, which is related to the American property tax system.

In the United States, individuals or businesses holding real estate or land are required to pay real estate taxes every year.

This tax varies depending on the location and size of the land, and often people are unable or unwilling to hand over the money for a variety of reasons.

Then the government will mark the property as tax delinquent and auction off the tax lien (property tax lien) on the house.

There are many reasons why you owe taxes.

For example, personal debt is too high and the money cannot be paid.

The household debt ratio in the United States is very high, reaching an average monthly household debt of US$145,000 at the end of last year.

But most cases are not caused by lack of money. Communication reasons are also common, but the government will not show mercy for this.

The government notifies you by letter every year how much tax you have to pay and when it is due.

If there is a problem during the delivery of the letter, and the owner, whether a company or an individual, fails to receive the letter due to various reasons, the tax payment may be delayed.

Once upon a time, a large parking lot of a chain drug store was auctioned off due to tax arrears, and the company faced an embarrassing situation.

In the United States, large pharmacies cannot operate without a parking lot, so he had to spend more money to rent the parking lot. Later, his company went to find the reason for unpaid taxes, and found out that it was a misunderstanding caused by the mailing address, but

There is no other way.

The U.S. market is contract-first.

What we often encounter is that all the owners of the land have passed away and have failed to pay taxes.

Sometimes the owner dies and the heirs are unwilling to pay the tax, or are unable to pay the tax, or they do not know they have inherited the land.

On one occasion, we photographed a piece of land that was owned by a company where two partners had passed away, but the company had not been dissolved before their deaths.

As a result, the land is still held by the company, and there is no actual manager with the right to pay property taxes.

I had to wait until the auction expired.

In other cases, the owner is old and forgets to pay taxes on time, or the couple moves away from their original residence after a divorce and no one remembers to pay taxes on the house they lived in together, so the lien on the house is auctioned off by the government.

What we do is participate in the auction as investors, but the ownership you get is not the direct ownership of the house, but the ownership of the debt.

After the tax lien is auctioned, the owner can redeem it within a certain period of time. Different states have different redemption regulations, ranging from about 6 months to 3 years.

Then I can get a certain amount of interest from it.

But if the owner still fails to redeem it after the stipulated time for redemption, then I can get the property rights of the house at a very low cost.

In this way, we can usually obtain the property rights of a property or real estate at 5% to 25% of the market price, and then sell it to a suitable buyer at the market price or slightly lower than the market price.