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That’s not that sure of a route. Lots of rentals don’t work out.
"does not work out" if you use your own money on leverage, which is what home flippers do. if they are gifted to you and paid off, then you cannot fail.
Of course you can fail. You get one set of non-paying tenants who wreck the place. It's not uncommon.
Yeah but even if they burn the place to the ground and salt the earth so that even the lot loses all value, you're still no worse off than you would have been if the property had been willed to somebody else. At least then you probably got to collect some rent on it. If you paid for it yourself that's a different story.
You've got a property which is producing no income and you can't sell, but you have to pay taxes on and often enough you're responsible for its condition (and can be fined by local authorities) even when you can do nothing about it. It is not hard for even a gifted property to be a white elephant.
All those taxes and fines, though are against the property, not you personally. They can put the property up for tax sale but they can't go after you.
The tax sale extinguishes the liens of junior lienholders, but they can still go after the former property owner -- the debt becomes unsecured, not invalid.
I practiced title law for a decade and did bankruptcies as well for a couple years and this simply isn't true. It's true for mortgages (at least in some states; I've heard of non-recourse states but Pennsylvania is not one of them) but in that case there are two separate transactions—the note, where the borrower agrees to pay the money back, and the mortgage itself, which collateralizes the property. If the collateral doesn't raise sufficient funds to cover the note, then yes, the borrower is still responsible for the difference. But tax sales are different.
In every state I'm familiar with (well, at least in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia), property taxes aren't assessed in personam, or against the owner, but *in rem(, against the property itself. Technically speaking, the property owes the tax. Most of the time, the owner is the one paying the tax, but, strictly speaking, he isn't personally responsible for it. I'm going to stick to Pennsylvania law here to avoid complicating things too much, but if the tax isn't paid for a certain number of years, it will go to auction. The minimum bid at the auction will be the tax owed, and once the property is sold, the tax lien disappears. One thing a tax sale definitely does not do is extinguish other liens. Some people look at the low minimum bid prices and think they've uncovered a treasure trove of cheap properties, and while deals can certainly be found, unless you know what you're doing you could find out that the property you just paid $2,000 for has $100,000 worth of liens on it you'll need to pay immediately to avoid another foreclosure. The exception is that if the property doesn't sell at the tax auction for the minimum bid, the liens will then be stripped and the property will go up for "free and clear" sale. Realistically, though, the only properties that get this far are garbage properties that no one wants for any price—small, landlocked parcels, property that doesn't come with the building that's on it, uneconomically small lots in fully-developed areas, etc.
There are a couple quasi-exceptions, but they aren't common. If a life-tenant doesn't pay property taxes they could be sued for waste by the remaindermen, though I've never heard of this happening (most life tenants are a thousand years old and the remaindermen are their children who will probably just pay the tax themselves if the life tenant can't afford it, and life tenancies are rare to begin with. The other one is that in some states, Pennsylvania and New Jersey among them, bankruptcy courts have ruled that tax sales can be considered fraudulent transfers subject to clawback, under the theory that the minimum-bid nature of the sale doesn't attempt to get market value. This would be pretty unusual to begin with, as I can't imagine a situation where someone would rack up enough debts to make bankruptcy worth it but somehow not mortgage their home in the process, AND still be delinquent on their tax bill. And even if it were to happen, the consequences would affect the buyer, not the bankrupt person; the concern is that the tax sale doesn't realized the actual market value of the house. Of course, a trustee's auction probably wouldn't do that either, but it would at least come closer.
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