Why the Payoff Is Higher Than the Minimum Bid on Struck-Off Property
You find a struck-off property listed at a few thousand dollars against an assessed value many times that. You ask the county for a payoff figure. The number that comes back is several times the listed bid, and nothing on the listing warned you.
This is the most common and most expensive surprise in buying struck-off property, and it is almost never explained properly. Here is what is happening, with figures from the 2,119 struck-off properties we track across Texas.
The minimum bid is not the price
When a property is struck off, a court has already entered a judgment for the taxes owed at that time. The minimum bid reflects that judgment. But the property keeps being assessed every year it sits unsold, and nobody is paying those bills.
Those later years are post-judgment taxes. They are not in the judgment, so they are not in the minimum bid, and the buyer takes them on. A property struck off three years ago has three more years of taxes behind it that the listing does not show.
The gap is not small. A listing showing a few thousand dollars can settle for several times that once the county calculates what is actually owed.
Some counties flag it. Most do not.
Right now 295 of the 2,119 struck-off properties we track carry a note saying they are subject to post-judgment taxes. Those come from 23 counties.
The other 1,824 say nothing. That does not mean they are clear. It means nobody wrote it down.
70% of struck-off listings have a completely empty notes field. Where the note does appear it is free text, typed by whoever processed the file, and we count 56 different spellings of it across the state, from "SUBJECT TO POST-JUDGMENT TAXES" to "Subject to 2025-forward post-judgment taxes" to "This property subject to post judgment taxes." It is a comment field, not a checkbox, and nobody audits it for completeness.
So the flag is useful in one direction only. When it is present, believe it. When it is absent, it tells you nothing at all.
The cheapest listings are the most likely to carry it
This is the part that costs people money. The properties that look like the best deals are disproportionately the ones with something behind them.
Navarro County is a sharp example. Of its 199 struck-off properties, 40 are flagged. But narrow it to the 17 cheapest relative to assessed value and 13 of those 17 carry the flag.
That is not a coincidence. A property with years of unpaid taxes stacked behind it is exactly the one nobody bid on, and exactly the one that still looks cheap on paper.
Statewide the pattern is milder. The median flagged listing has a minimum bid around 58% of assessed value against 74% for unflagged ones. Navarro is an outlier, which is itself worth knowing before you choose where to spend your time.
What to do before you commit money
Request a payoff from the county clerk or the collecting law firm in writing. Ask for the total due including all post-judgment taxes, recording fees, and documentary charges. Ask what date the figure is good through, because these expire. Do this before you wire anything, not after you have decided.
Treat the listed bid as a floor, never a price. If your plan only works at the listed number, you do not have a plan yet.
Check the assessed value against the payoff, not against the bid. A property at 15% of value on the listing can be at 90% once the real number arrives.
Ask whether the county sells below judgment. Some taxing units will accept less than the full amount on property that has sat a long time. That conversation only happens if you start it.
Where we can help, and where we cannot
We track every struck-off property in our coverage and show the post-judgment flag where the county published one, so you can see which listings are already known to carry it without reading 2,119 records by hand. We also show assessed value against minimum bid, so the ones that only look cheap are easy to spot.
What we cannot do, and what nobody can, is tell you a listing is clean. The county holds that number and only produces it on request. Any service claiming otherwise is guessing with your money.
More on how struck-off property works, including how it differs from buying at auction: Struck-Off Properties in Texas.
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