Padre, the taxes are a great way to find out if they got out of trouble. When the bank takes it back, they don’t pay the taxes until it sells on the market usually. An escrow account won’t pay them if you are missing payments and if the occupant doesn’t have an impound account, they wont pay them if they are trying to live free for a while becuase the lender acts long before the county will (they don’t seize until you are 5 years behind).

But in order to do a mod or refi or sell, the taxes have to be current for anything new to record, thus seeing taxes being brought current on a property you can almost certainly remove it from the “shadow inventory” pile.

If you run them all and find the taxes were paid on half, then you will have a nice little case study on what percentage will never come to market, thus far you’ve done two and both can be taken off the list. Maybe those are the only two and the rest are empty being hidden by a conspiracy, but until someone checks, we are all guessing.

Anectdotally I have more and more aquiantances that were fb’s and they are getting successful mods, even one got one on his rental (which is total b.s. because now it cash flows, at the expense of the rest of us). These mods are not that great in the long term, they have to ultimately pay it back when they sell, some have a five year term and then it reverts back, many are 40 yr loans, their places need to double in value in order to break even but all they know is their payment was cut in half and that’s enough for them for now.