"95% of Tax Lien Certificates Are Redeemed" — Is That Claim True?

The Claim, Word for Word

This is a real pitch, currently running as of this week: '95% of tax lien certificates are redeemed. That means the homeowner pays you back with 8-36% government-backed interest. Safe. Predictable. The other 5%? You foreclose... Buy 20 liens. Collect interest on 19. Own 1 house. Repeat.' (@dustinhahnrealestate, TikTok, Apr 28, 2026). It's a clean, compelling pitch, and it's built almost entirely out of true individual facts arranged to sound better together than they play out in practice. We're not calling this a scam or attacking the person who posted it - the county-auction mechanism it describes is real and legal, and we cover the mechanics elsewhere on this site in detail. What we're doing here is what we'd want someone to do for us: check the math before you bid twenty times on the strength of a 45-second video.

What's Actually True: Redemption Is High, But It's Not One Number

Redemption rates in the 95-98% range are a fair characterization for experienced, diversified buyers - we've cited that same range on this site for Texas redeemable-deed purchases and for tax lien states generally. But 'redemption rate' isn't a single national constant; it's an outcome that depends heavily on who's buying and what they're buying. That range describes sophisticated buyers - often institutional, always research-heavy - who screen out the properties likely to become the problem cases before they ever bid. An amateur buying off a list without that screening is working from a different, worse distribution: buy without checking for buildability, access, environmental history, or a mortgage that will motivate a bank to redeem quickly, and your personal redemption rate can run well below the headline figure. The claim isn't fabricating a number so much as quietly assuming you're already the sophisticated buyer it's describing - the same assumption is baked into the '20 liens, 19 redeem' arithmetic, which only holds if all 20 liens were screened as carefully as an institutional desk would screen them.

What's Oversimplified: The "8-36%" Headline Rate

The 8-36% figure is real, but it's the statutory ceiling set by state law, not a number most bidders actually collect. Florida's ceiling is 18%, bid down competitively at auction - and on Florida's online county auctions, institutional bidders routinely bid that rate down toward the 0.25% statutory floor, turning an advertised double-digit return into a fraction of a percent for whoever wins. Real investors describe the same dynamic on Reddit: 'Tax liens for quality properties virtually never go for just the taxes. They are bid up to prices that often don't make economic sense... Tax lien investing can be profitable but it is nowhere as easy or risk free as the promotors would have you think' (u/Airbnb4Me, r/RealEstateTaxes, Jul 5, 2023). Another commenter in the same thread put a number on who's winning that competition: 'Tax liens are state by state and large funds buy them up in the thousands and are happy with a 6-8% return on them. So a lot of competition' (u/Odd-Upstairs6083, r/RealEstateTaxes, Jul 5, 2023). The '8-36%' range isn't false - it's the ceiling the law allows, not the floor the market actually pays a typical individual bidder.

The Real Work Behind "The Other 5%, You Foreclose"

This is the step the pitch compresses into four words. In practice, foreclosing on a non-redeemed lien means attorney fees, court filing costs, publication costs, and title work that realistically run $3,500 to $10,000+ per property, plus months of waiting for the process to clear - figures we've documented in detail elsewhere on this site. And the property you end up with isn't guaranteed to be worth the trouble. A California investor who has bought at Riverside County auctions for over a decade described watching newer buyers repeatedly overpay against real comps, citing one case of someone who paid $30,000 for land typically worth $5,000 and still hadn't broken even nine years later (Leonard L., BiggerPockets, Jan 28, 2015). 'Own 1 house' sounds like the consolation prize is automatically a win. Sometimes it's a $30,000 lesson wearing a house-shaped costume.

Marcus Field Notes: Fact-Check, Not Takedown

I don't think the person behind this pitch is lying, exactly. Every individual fact in it is defensible on its own. The problem is the same one I see in a lot of tax lien marketing: real numbers, arranged in the most flattering possible order, with the boring parts - screening, title searches, attorney bills, the fact that a bid-down auction rarely pays the statutory ceiling - left out because they don't fit in a 45-second video.

Here's the honest version. Redemption rates in the mid-90s to high-90s percent range are realistic if you're doing the research an experienced buyer does - not if you're buying off a list you haven't screened. The interest rate you'll actually collect is closer to what competitive bidding pays in your county than to the statutory ceiling advertised in the pitch. And if you land in the minority that doesn't redeem, foreclosing is a real process with real costs and a real chance the property isn't worth what you hoped.

None of that means tax lien investing doesn't work. It does, for people who treat it like the research-heavy business it is instead of the 'buy 20, collect on 19, own a house' math problem it gets reduced to online. That's the whole reason this site exists - the receipts, not the pitch.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about the 95% redemption claim.