What happens to unsold tax sale properties?

[speedfreeksteve]

Do these just show up in the municipalities next tax sale or what? Do they lower the minimum bid price?

[Frank]

No, they are off the list.  Properties only go up for tax sale when they have at least three years taxes owing (actually four when you consider that the registration has to be in place for a year before the sale).  So if the sale has been cancelled since they have paid up, then it will take another four to five years at least before you might see that property up for grabs through this process.

[Rob]

Speedfreak,

Are you refering to if the property went up for sale and no bids were given (or only bids lower than the min amount)?  In this case I believe they can put the property up again for resale.  They would need to wait another year because of the registration process.    On this point though I am unsure and perhaps other members of this forum might have more insight.

[Frank]

Steve (I assume your first name is not Speed, or freak)

I believe that based on Rob's last post I may have mis-interpreted your question.  I assumed you were talking about sales that got cancelled based on the taxes having been paid-up by the current owner. 

Assuming that a municipality places a property up for sale, and no successful bids are received, then the tax registration can be cancelled by the Municipality, or they can take ownership of the property.  The municipality, under the current legislation, has one year from the date of the sale to take ownership and during that time they have the right to enter onto the property (with police escort if necessary) to do whatever tests and inspections they might want to do before excercising their option to take ownership. 

This comes in handy, for example, in the case of properties that are suspected of being contaminated.   On the assumption that the taxes in these cases are usually pretty high, because they were previoualy (before 2000) afraid to go to sale on these properties since under the old legislation they were required to take ownership immediately and no right of inspection. 

Many municipalities are now going to sale on these properties, and then doing full environmenal inspections on them.  With this information in hand and with the financial assistance of the recently approved Brownfields legislation, they are being quite successful in attracting investors who want to take ownership and post guarantees of clean-up and redevelopment in return for a drastically reduced price.   While the final selling price is usually much lower than the taxes owing originally, this is high risk and high finance stuff and their are people out there who specialise in these areas. 

Another scenario would have the municipality take over the property, and then turn it into some municipal use, or declaring it surplus and putting it up for sale as a surplus piece of municipal property.  While they usually advertise or market these and try to get full value, they will usually go to the highest bidder, with no minimum bid requirement as there was in the tax sale process.   There is no requirement to advertise these in the gazette and therefore you will only notice them locally.

Often times as well, these properties are slivers of land which are remnant parcels carved out of a subdivision (usually on the fringes) which are intended to be included with the next stage of development, but the landowners have not been able to agree, and the original developer has walked away - in these cases the municipality will hold it until someday when the neighbour decides to develop.

Hope this helps, if I have not hit the nail on the head somwhere on this please let me know with perhaps more specifics regarding the situation you had intended.

[speedfreeksteve]

Yes my name is Steve, and Speedfreak refers to my driving, not any illicit drug use.

What made me come up with this question is looking back at some sales of properties that I would've expected people to bid on, but nobody has since they sounded like something I would've bid on if I knew I would get it for the minimum. Of course I didn't see any of these properties in person, so there may very well be a valid reason for no bids if it's a terrible property.