Thursday, December 29, 2005
Chicago Tribune
by Courtney Flynn

Most people showed up for the first day of Cook County's biennial property tax scavenger sale Wednesday looking for a deal on land they could resell or develop if the owners don't pay back their delinquent taxes.

But Wil-James Johnson wanted the opposite: He crossed his fingers that the owners of five properties he bought taxes from will repay what they owe so he'll earn back what he spent plus interest.

"I'm old. What am I going to do if I got it?" said Johnson, 62. "I wouldn't have bid on it if I thought I was going to get it."

At scavenger sales such as the one administered by the Cook County treasurer's office Wednesday, property owners with delinquent taxes have between 6 months and 2 1/2 years to redeem taxes on their land, or the buyer could petition the courts for the deed, officials said.

If the taxes are redeemed by the owner, the buyer would get back the money bid at the sale, recoup any fees and receive interest on the bid, said Scott Burnham, a spokesman for the Cook County clerk's office. The interest rates range from 12 percent to 51 percent depending on how long it takes an owner to repay.

"You can only get 3 percent interest at the bank," said Johnson, an investor who runs his own Chicago company that holds scavenger sale seminars.

Owners end up redeeming a majority of the taxes, Burnham said.

The biennial sale, which ends Jan. 17, includes about 20,000 parcels ranging from vacant lots to commercial sites with two or more years of delinquent taxes. Only registered buyers may participate. The registration ended in mid-December.

Unlike the county's annual property-tax sale in which buyers must pay for all delinquent taxes to receive a tax sales certificate that could lead to a claim on the property's deed, buyers at the biennial sale may bid as little as $250, officials said.

But the parcels at the biennial sale are those that have been passed over at other sales.

"You're picking from the junk pile," said James Broder, 55, of Monee. "You're looking for the good ones out of the junk pile."

Broder, a repeat scavenger-sale bidder, said he bought seven vacant lots ranging from $300 to $2,000 in residential areas in Chicago Heights on Wednesday. He hopes to build on the lots or resell them, he said.

First-time bidder Moukhtar Zantout said he also planned to resell the three vacant residential lots he bought for about $1,400 total.

"This is the reason I'm here: to make money," said Zantout, 52, a home contractor by trade. "The chances are very slim that the owner will come now and try to do something about it."