The winners have been selected and the funds collected. The verdict: "It looks like it met all our hopes and dreams," Maricopa County Treasurer David Schweikert said of the county's first-ever Internet-based tax certificate sale.
Grant Street Group, a Pittsburgh-based software company that specializes in customized software applications for financial institutions and government entities, was selected by Maricopa to host the auction using their LienAuction platform. To date, more than 180,000 tax certificates totaling over $418 million have been sold using LienAuction.
"This was our 16th tax certificate auction and it really could not have gone any better," said Wade Horigan, Grant Street Group's LienAuction Product Manager. "We are as happy with the outcome as David [Schweikert]."
Thanks in part to the LienAuction platform, Maricopa County was able to sell 86.4 percent of the liens offered, compared with 74.5 percent last year. The increase helped Maricopa collect an estimated $17 million in back taxes and clear more than 13,000 tax liens from its books during its first online auction.
In previous years, Maricopa's annual auctions attracted about 150 buyers who had to physically be on County premises in order to bid in the auction. This year, there were over 3,000 registrants and 900 participating bidders in the online auction.
"We had people from Europe; we had people from Asia; I know we had one from Hong Kong," Schweikert said of the auction participants. "What really surprised me was that the vast number of people were local."
Maricopa has decided to hold a follow-up auction with Grant Street Group for those certificates that were not sold in the initial auction.