Start Small: Beginner-Friendly NY Tax Deeds

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]So, what counties in New York for tax deeds are the best for beginners and how does that work? So, when you're a beginner doing tax deeds in New York, you want to avoid some of the bigger counties, right? Like if you're in Manhattan, obviously, it's not going to make sense. We've had some of the best luck in some of the smaller counties, the more rural areas. And often, the smaller the county, the better it can go. So, for example, St. Lawrence County, they often have like 75-plus parcels coming up and often there's a lot of affordable small houses that go and there's less institutional competition and can be very beginner-friendly there. And they have low barrier to entry deals, which is great.

[00:00:45]From here, we have the Syracuse area, which is I'm going to screw this up, Onondaga County. And you know, it's a larger population, but strong resale, they got vacant land, they have houses, and that's a great place.

[00:00:58]From there, we have uh Fulton County. We like that place as well. They have an online auction in June, lower competition, which is awesome. Some smaller towns, right? A lot of these smaller municipalities are great places to look and this is often an overlooked auction. So, Josh, in New York, can you bid from home or do you have to always show up in person?

[00:01:18]>> Nice, yeah. What's really cool is that a lot of New York counties are actually heading towards online auction platforms. And so, some states, you know, the whole state is on a certain platform, like California's on Bid for Assets a lot. And so, you may find a few online sales in New York on Bid for Assets. So, that's going to be one of the best places to check out. But a second one that's very popular is Absolute Auctions and Realty. That's called AAR or NYS Auctions. And so, it was a few months ago, we were actually looking at past sales on one of those online platforms and Absolute Auctions and Realty. When you look at it pretty quickly, it looks like they're just selling like junk cars. You might see old police vehicles there. You might see like construction machinery, things like that. And at face value, it doesn't look like there's much going on as far as real estate goes. But a lot of counties in New York will use that website. And so I think Dutchess, Madison, Sullivan, Clinton, and Otsego, those are all New York counties that use that website. And so places like that, they don't have great infrastructure. Their website isn't user-friendly. And so that can be Those counties can have really good opportunities versus Bid for Assets, where that's been around for, let's say, 15 years, 20 years. And so a lot of seasoned investors know about Bid for Assets, but they may not know about absolute auctions and realty. So in person and then also online, so you can be buying this stuff from the comfort of your own home, which is amazing. So you don't have to take long trips, you don't have to get on planes and things like that. And you can have someone drive a property virtually.