LienSimple
Editorial & data policy
LienSimple exists because so much tax-sale information online is confidently wrong. That only means something if we hold our own data to a standard you can check. Here is that standard.
Primary source first
Every state rule we publish is traced to the governing statute and an official county or state source that we fetched and read — not to another investing site. Where a source is silent, we say so explicitly rather than fill the gap with an assumption. State guides carry their citations; auction entries link to the official county or state page.
Every entry is dated
Statutes change. Each state record and each auction listing carries a last-verified date so you can see how fresh it is, and we re-verify statutory fields when reusing older data. We never stamp a page with a build-time date to fake freshness.
We label confidence honestly
Auction dates are marked confirmed, statutory (rule-computed but the posted list isn’t out yet), or not-yet-announced. A statutory date is a projection from law, not proof that a specific sale is scheduled — and we say which is which on every page.
Statutory ceiling ≠ realized return
We do not present a state’s maximum statutory rate as a return an investor will earn. In premium-bid and bid-down states, competition moves the real rate below the ceiling; in flat-penalty states, the return depends on when the owner redeems. We refuse to quote a single ‘average tax-lien return’ figure because no reliable one exists.
Corrections are public and welcome
When we get something wrong, we fix the underlying data and the correction propagates to every page that uses it. Our public corrections page documents claims that are commonly stated wrong across the industry — including ones we ourselves previously had to fix. If you spot an error, email us and we will correct it.
About ‘Marcus’, our narrator
Some of our educational articles are written in the first person under the name ‘Marcus’, an illustrative narrator used to make examples concrete. Marcus is not a real customer, and the first-person stories and dollar figures are illustrative scenarios at statutory rates, not records of actual trades. This is disclosed on each such article. The underlying rules, rates and citations are real and sourced.
Who is responsible
LienSimple is built and edited by Ayoola Jegede, an operator and data-systems builder. Editorial responsibility for the data and its corrections sits with the LienSimple Editorial Team. We are not tax attorneys or licensed advisers, and nothing we publish is investment, legal or tax advice.
Independence
We are not paid by auction platforms, counties, or educators to place, rank or describe them favorably. When we reference an auction vendor on a county page, it is because that is who runs that county’s sale. Our scores are relative rankings for a retail investor, defined openly in the dataset rubric.
How we use automation
We use software and AI assistance to gather, structure and monitor public data at scale, but statutory classifications and rates are verified against primary sources before publication, and factual corrections take priority over automation. Automation never invents a value — an unknown is recorded as unknown.
Contact & corrections
Corrections, source questions and press requests: press@taxliensimple.com.