Inside Texas Foreclosure Investing: The Ethical Way to Profit While Helping Homeowners
Show summary
In this episode of the Real Estate Pros podcast, host Quentin interviews Arnie Abramson, a seasoned expert in foreclosure investing. Arnie shares his journey into the world of tax sales and foreclosures, detailing the complexities and challenges of the auction process. He emphasizes the importance of education and preparation for investors looking to navigate this intricate market. Arnie also discusses key strategies for successful bidding, the significance of research, and how to create win-win situations for all parties involved. He highlights the differences between tax sales and trustee sales, providing valuable insights for both new and experienced investors. Listeners are encouraged to connect with Arnie and his team for guidance in the Texas foreclosure market.
Key takeaways
- Texas has two main foreclosure types: tax sales (for unpaid property taxes) and trustee sales (mortgage foreclosures), and both happen at the same time and same place, which creates a logistical challenge investors need a system to solve.
- Texas has 254 counties; in an average month roughly 30-40 counties hold tax sales while around 200 may have trustee sales, so covering the whole state requires a trained team rather than one person.
- Arnie moved his focus from the competitive Dallas-Fort Worth market to smaller communities after hedge funds entered the space and increased competition, which resulted in less competition and better prices for his investors.
- His company's model is to teach investors in two phases: first through Zoom classes, then hands-on in the field at actual sales, after which investors can operate independently in a county while his team covers others.
- On distressed property deals (e.g., inherited homes without probate where an occupant isn't the legal owner), his strategy is to buy below value, build in a profit margin, and then carry the note back to the original occupant so they can stay and everyone benefits.
- He structures his business so that team members and bidders make more money the lower they buy a property for, which removes the incentive for a hired bidder to overpay or hide a lower winning price from the client.
- Arnie sees AI and improved efficiency as the way to expand coverage into more of Texas's harder-to-track trustee sales, which are much more difficult to locate and monitor than tax sales.
About Arnie Abramson
Arnie Abramson is a Texas-based real estate investor who previously worked as a financial planner before transitioning into real estate about 20+ years ago. He built a business managing 250 properties with a 10-person office, then shifted toward teaching tax sale and trustee sale foreclosure investing across Texas, eventually building out a full-service team covering sales statewide.
Listen to the audio
“That's the philosophy of our company is we want everybody to win. We want our members to win. We're doing all the work we want to win. And most importantly, we want the people who are about to lose their house to win if we can possibly help them.”
Arnie Abramson
“We figured out how to do it where they make more money the lower they buy it for. So everybody wins. That's the whole objective.”
Arnie Abramson
“It's a very complicated process, and it's a lot of work. And I think people that were doing it, they didn't want to create their own competition.”
Arnie Abramson
Questions answered in this episode
What's the difference between a tax sale and a trustee sale in Texas?
A tax sale happens when a property owner hasn't paid their property taxes and the county forecloses. A trustee sale is a mortgage foreclosure. In Texas, both types of sales happen at the same time and in the same place, which makes covering both a logistical challenge.
How many foreclosure sales happen in Texas each month?
Texas has 254 counties. In an average month, around 30 to 40 counties hold tax sales, while roughly 200 counties may have trustee sales. Trustee sales are much harder to locate and track than tax sales.
Why did Arnie Abramson shift from Dallas-Fort Worth to smaller Texas communities?
As hedge funds discovered the tax sale market (one even hired his team to bid for them), competition in the Dallas-Fort Worth area increased significantly. He moved focus to smaller communities where there is less competition, which results in better prices for his investors.
How does Arnie structure deals to help homeowners who are about to lose their property?
In cases like an inherited property without a completed probate, where the occupant isn't the legal owner and risks losing the home, his team buys the property below value, builds in their profit, and then carries the note back to the person so they can keep living there while paying over time.
How does Arnie's company teach people to get started in foreclosure investing?
They teach in two phases: first through Zoom classes covering the fundamentals, then hands-on training in the field at actual auctions. After that training, investors can operate independently in their county while the company's team covers other counties.
Resources and links
- Texas Tax Sales Resource Group LLC
- Arnie Abramson’s Phone Number: (214) 869-7188
- Arnie Abramson’s Email: arnie@txtaxsales.com
Full transcript
ARNIE ABRAMSON (00:00)
I think I understand. I’m one of these crazy people. I’m a little bit analytical, a little bit this and that. I’m sort of encompassed. So and this is the answer to not only that question, but a lot of questions is and one of the questions I get frequently is, what do you like best about this whole thing? And the answer is, it’s the people involved. I love to.
I, you know, we’ve got a big organization, we get people all over calling in all the time. I want them to call me. We’ve got a staff now. But I give them my cell number because that’s what I enjoy is the interaction with people and to help them. And I feel good when that happens. And that’s the philosophy of our company is we want everybody to win. Yeah, we want our members to win. We’re doing all the work we want to win.
Quentin Edmonds (02:25)
Hello everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I am your host, Q Edmonds. And when I tell you I’m excited today, I’m excited because I have a fantastic guest who literally almost made me spit out my water. Literally. But I think you’re going to love this gentleman here. He’s going to talk to you about the foreclosure market. And listen, he want to help investors by teaching them how to do it themselves or
You can just have them do everything, but I’m let him tell you more about it. But I’m so happy to introduce you all to Mr. Arnie Abramson. We just went through this. Abramson, how are doing today,
Absolutely. I’m doing good, man. Thank you so much. Mr. Arnie, listen, sir, I actually kind of just want to dive in. I would love for you to tell the people what your main focus is in real estate these days. ⁓ If you want to give us a little bit of an origin story of how you got started with real estate, we would love to know the origin story and then tell them what part of the world you’re in, what markets you’re operating in. And so, Mr. Arnie, sir, you have the floor.
ARNIE ABRAMSON (03:32)
Well, thank you. I don’t know where to begin. That’s a long, long list. Yeah. In my former life before real estate, I was a financial planner for several years. And I’m now in Texas. And I started my current real estate career in Texas about 20 something years ago.
My wife and I went to a seminar that somebody was presenting and he was talking about the different phases of real estate and that kind of stuff and that started us on our journey and it’s a long explanation. But the bottom line is after I got to a certain point and I said I looked around one day and I had an office with 10 employees. We were managing 250 properties.
And I became an administrator. I said, this isn’t what I wanted. You know, I want to get back now. Hey, I’m 136 years old now. I’m ready to start scaling back, you know? And so I said, OK, well, we started doing that. We started liquidating. And we had partners on a lot of that, a lot of the properties. We didn’t own them all ourselves because that was the financial planner. I plenty of clients and we worked for them.
So we started to downscale and I said, you know, it took a little while, but I said, what I really want to do is two things. I want to play more golf, have more time to play more golf. And I want to teach people about tax sales, the tax foreclosure sales called tax sales in Texas, because I enjoy it.
I enjoyed the interaction. It’s smaller groups and all that. So that took place and we started to do that. And then I hurt my shoulder. couldn’t play much more golf. So started doing a little more of the classes. And more more people kept coming to me and growing and growing and growing. And I was ready to retire and do this, right? But all of a sudden.
these opportunities came, I found out that nobody was teaching about tax sales in Texas. And nobody was covering the whole state. And nobody was doing a lot of things. And the big reason was, I think, it’s a very complicated process. And it’s a lot of work. And I think people that were doing it, they didn’t want to create their own competition.
people about it. I didn’t realize it at the time, but what a great opportunity. ⁓ And we started teaching people and growing and then, okay, a limitation comes up. All the sales are at the same time on the same day. How do you cover all that? Well, we developed a program to bring people in and teach them how to do it and to share it and that kind of stuff. And then another ⁓ obstacle or
would be obstacle comes up and you know, how do you get all the information? How do you do this? How do you do that? And it just evolved over the years that now we just do everything. And here’s the craziest part of all. I really shouldn’t say this publicly, but we’ve got more business than we can handle now. We want more people to get in touch with us. If they’re in Texas or willing to come to Texas,
once a month and to get out to all these sales. mean, it’s just crazy. Yeah. Wow. Wow.
Quentin Edmonds (07:57)
So what would be the first step if someone, like, you cause you teach, said you can teach someone how to do this or you can do it for them. So what would, if somebody that wanted to be taught, what would be one of the first things you would want them to know about this?
ARNIE ABRAMSON (08:10)
Well, they need to know what a foreclosure is and the two main types of foreclosures and taxes that we deal with. And the first one is what we call the tax sales. That’s when people get foreclosed on because they haven’t paid their property tax. But we’ve since expanded for interesting reasons that I can tell you about to also include the mortgage foreclosures. And those are.
referred to as trustees, trustee sale in Texas. So tax sale and trustee sale. And here’s the interesting part. They’re both at the same time at the same place. How do you handle that? Well, we figured out a way. And so that’s, I forgot the question, but that’s the answer.
Quentin Edmonds (08:53)
Yes, sir.
no, no, you answered because I was saying one the first things they need to know. So you answered it for sure. So you came from the world of being a financial planner and then, you you got into real estate. And so I kind of to pick your brain a little bit about you in a sense. What what are things that you have identified throughout your life that had made you successful where you are today? When I say things, I mean.
Are you analytical? Do you like research? Is it discipline? Like, what are the things about you that kind of make you good at what you do? Does that make sense?
ARNIE ABRAMSON (09:37)
I think I understand. I’m one of these crazy people. I’m a little bit analytical, a little bit this and that. I’m sort of encompassed. So and this is the answer to not only that question, but a lot of questions is and one of the questions I get frequently is, what do you like best about this whole thing? And the answer is, it’s the people involved. I love to.
I, you know, we’ve got a big organization, we get people all over calling in all the time. I want them to call me. We’ve got a staff now. But I give them my cell number because that’s what I enjoy is the interaction with people and to help them. And I feel good when that happens. And that’s the philosophy of our company is we want everybody to win. Yeah, we want our members to win. We’re doing all the work we want to win.
And most importantly, we want the people who are about to lose their house to win if we can possibly help them. We do that a lot. And then everybody wins. And that’s really what we achieve. And we have so much fun doing it because we’re helping you know, that you feel good about that. And the reason that we’re kind of the only ones doing this, it’s an enormous amount of work. And we didn’t sit down one day and say, let’s plan this out.
It just happened. We were doing this. Well, this is a problem. Let’s figure out a way to do it. And it just grew. And now we’re just making the transition more than we ever had before to include more and more of the trustee sales. And here’s why. Is I’m sure no matter what stage most of the states, housing prices have gone up big time.
So now almost everybody has got to have a mortgage. It wasn’t necessarily so true several years ago. And there are still a lot of people who don’t have a mortgage. Maybe they inherited it and didn’t go through a probate. Well, they’re not legally the owner. If they get behind, they’re going to lose their property. Well, if we can go and buy it and figure out a way to help them, like say, okay, well, we just bought it.
We’ll build in our profit because we bought it below value. We’ll build in our profit and we’ll own the finances back to you. We’ll carry the note, you know? So you feel good on those kind of things. Everybody wants long answer to short question, my apologies.
Quentin Edmonds (12:54)
⁓ I love it though. I love long form answers. So you write up my alley. So I appreciate it. And I always say, think at the core, at the foundation of any sustainable business is servitude. If you find a way to really serve people and help people, you’re going to continue to be successful because again, the foundation is help, is serving people. And so I love that, that, you know, I keep hearing you saying help people, help people.
It’s a win-win, everybody wins. And I’m so glad that these notes are falling into your hands because you know some people are not really looking to help people if we’re being honest. And so I’m happy about that.
ARNIE ABRAMSON (13:36)
Well, we’re having so much fun with it, you know. People call me and friends I’ve known for years and they say, did I wake you up? It’s eight o’clock. I said, I’ve been up since six. Every morning I get up. I can’t wait to get to the computer and get going. It’s amazing. Wasn’t what I planned. It happened. And when am I supposed to sit around and wait to die? You know, come on. This is too much fun. Yeah.
Quentin Edmonds (14:03)
No, I love it. I really appreciate your energy. really appreciate your outlook. So Mr. Arnie, let me ask you, what is the next real goal for you? Like, what are you looking to solve or scale next? What’s next for you, Mr. Arnie?
ARNIE ABRAMSON (14:18)
Well, probably to, as AI grows, to try to embrace that more because it’ll make us more efficient and we can then get to more counties. See, not every county has a sale every month, but in Texas has 254 counties. Now in a good month, in the average month, there may be 30 or 40 counties that have a tax sale.
but there may be 200 of them that have trustee sales. They’re so much harder to locate, to find, to do that. that’s our challenge now, is to duplicate the success we’ve had with the tax sales into the trustee sales.
Quentin Edmonds (15:46)
Gotcha.
Listen, I heard you, know, Mr. Arnie, you said you have staff. I love how you are one to help people. So I want to bring up the idea. You’ve been talking about it, but I want to bring up the word relationships. I would love to know what is your perspective when it comes to relationships? Do you prioritize building relationships, have building relationships impacted you within your space? Like, what is your outlook when it comes to building relationships?
ARNIE ABRAMSON (16:14)
I’m not sure what to really ask him, but let me give you an example, maybe that’ll… Before I moved out of Dallas into the country where all our friends said, oh, you’ll be back in two weeks. That was 27 years ago, I think, or something like that. Before all that, we had an office in the people and in the Dallas Fort Worth area. It’s a lot of people.
millions and ⁓ that’s where we were and ⁓ then we moved out to the country where everybody said you know you’ll never last and we’re still here but I kind of lost touch with it you know because now we’ve expanded and you know we were doing the trustee sales and I’m sorry the tax sales in just Dallas and Fort Worth for a while and once
once we started getting more and more competition and we knew where it was coming from, was the hedge funds were finding it because one of them hired us to do something, not to bid for them. And once the competition got more and more people because of that, we started, I said, we’re no longer gonna do this, we’re go to the smaller communities. And that has been perfect because a lot less competition.
And that means better prices for our investors. ⁓ But the point to answer your question was, years gone by and all these people that I knew from all the clubs, and we had a club in Dallas and Fort Worth, would meet all the time. Every now and then we’d run across them, or somebody would call out of the blue.
It was like it was yesterday. We all had something in common. So the relationships and the new relationships we build with the people who have come in now. And and we. Our program is when I say we teach him, we teach him in two ways. Number one, we have classes that we teach him with Zoom classes online and. Then we take him in the field and we show him what to do.
and we have them learn what to do. And then we don’t have to go with them anymore. They can go to that county. We can go to other counties. That’s the help we have expanded to get where we can cover the whole state. Yeah. Yeah. answer again. Sorry.
Quentin Edmonds (18:46)
No, but again, I love long form answers, especially when it makes sense, especially when it’s cohesive and that’s very cohesive. So I appreciate it. really, really do. Listen, Mr. Arnie is there any topic that we have not talked about about what you do that maybe you want to touch on? Or is there any other words of maybe education, motivation or inspiration that you want to give people? I would love to hear it.
ARNIE ABRAMSON (19:12)
Well.
It’s a tall order there. And I’m not a short-winded speaker, right? But honestly, all I know now is about what we’re doing. But the whole focus should be on the people, the people involved. That’s what turns us on, the relationships we build and…
Quentin Edmonds (19:22)
⁓ I love it, I love it.
ARNIE ABRAMSON (19:42)
And when everybody’s happy and everybody wins, mean, I’m not sure if that’s answering your question, but. No.
Quentin Edmonds (19:50)
That’s the answer. That’s the answer. That’s the answer. No, I love it. Like, no, please.
ARNIE ABRAMSON (19:53)
Yeah.
There’s no way to shortcut explanation about this. That’s why there’s not a lot of competition for us. It’s very complicated. It’s and we didn’t plan to solve it. It just happened. we’ve invented stuff and ways to do it. Yeah. Like somebody could come along and say, OK, I can hire a bunch of people to go out to all these counties at the same time. Well, how are you going to feel about somebody going on and say, OK.
They’re going to, this is the most you can bid on a property for somebody. Well, okay. How do you know that if you could buy it for less, he’s going to do that and not tell you about it. You know, that’s the thing. They can’t go hire anybody to do stuff like that. And I’m not saying people are bad, some do that. Well, we figured that out. We figured out how to do it where they make more money the lower they buy it for.
So everybody wins. That’s the whole objective.
Quentin Edmonds (21:01)
Yeah.
Yeah, well, I love it. I love that you build something where everybody wins. I love that you build something that’s really helping people. And I love that you build something that makes you happy, that makes you motivated to get to the computer and happy to wake up and begin to compute every morning.
if someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate with you, learn more about what you’re doing, how can they get in contact with you?
ARNIE ABRAMSON (21:28)
Let me give you my phone number first, because that’s always the best way. gotcha. I tell people, rather than emailing or there are no short answers in this end of the business. So I prefer to talk.
Okay, 214-869-7188.
also you can reach me
it’s arnie@, and then it’s TXTaxSales, TX for Texas, txtaxsales.com.
Quentin Edmonds (21:59)
Absolutely.
Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for sharing. I want to thank you for your story. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your perspective. I know people going to get a ton of value out of this episode. this was a good podcast and I appreciate you so much for being on.
ARNIE ABRAMSON (22:14)
I appreciate it for you too. And let me say this, if anyone gets with us and because of you, I will definitely let you know. And we have a little surprise for you.
Quentin Edmonds (22:24)
There you go. Listen, you are definitely the man that wants everybody to win for sure. For sure. Absolutely. So listen, sir, I appreciate you. Thank you again. Everyone you heard, Mr. Arnie, you got the value out of this. can’t tell me you didn’t. So definitely check him out, but definitely make sure you are subscribed here. We do not want you to miss out.
ARNIE ABRAMSON (22:30)
going to politics, right? ⁓
Quentin Edmonds (22:48)
on incredible conversations that we’re going to continue to have. So Mr. Arnie, thank you again. And to everyone else, we’ll see you on the next one.
ARNIE ABRAMSON (22:55)
Thank you.
