Florida: the courts run the auction, and the calendar is public
Florida is a judicial-foreclosure state, which means every foreclosure passes through a court case and ends — if the borrower doesn't cure — at a clerk-run auction. Those auctions are scheduled twenty to thirty-five days out and published county by county, complete with case number, property address, parcel ID, and the final judgment amount that effectively sets the lender's opening position.
The judgment amount is the underwriting shortcut: compare it against the property's market value and the equity picture is immediate. Propseek indexes sixteen of Florida's largest county auction dockets — Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Hillsborough, Orange, Duval among them — currently more than 1,200 scheduled sales at any given time.
Judicial states (Florida, Illinois) publish court-run auction calendars with case numbers, sale dates, and judgment amounts.
Michigan: statewide coverage, buried in newspaper boilerplate
Michigan forecloses by advertisement: the lender publishes a notice in a county legal newspaper for four consecutive weeks, posts it on the property, and the sheriff conducts the sale. There's no court docket to read — the newspapers are the record. That makes Michigan simultaneously the best-covered state (all 83 counties publish) and the messiest, because the data lives inside statutory legal text rather than a table.
Buried in that boilerplate is everything an investor needs: the commonly-known-as address, the sheriff-sale date and time, the amount claimed due, and the foreclosing firm's file number. Extracted and de-duplicated across the four-week publication cycle, Michigan currently yields roughly 1,500 active foreclosure notices — about 330 new ones a week.
California: trustee postings, no advance bid
California's non-judicial process runs through deed-of-trust trustees. A recorded Notice of Default starts the clock; a Notice of Trustee Sale sets the auction. The sale postings — address, sale date and time, county, postponement status — are published by posting companies on behalf of the trustees, and postponements are constant: a majority of active postings carry at least one rescheduled date.
What California does not publish in advance is the opening bid, which is typically announced at the sale. That makes the state's list a timing signal rather than a pricing signal — the recorded notice tells you an owner is in the window where a pre-auction conversation still matters. Statewide coverage currently runs just under 800 active trustee-sale postings, concentrated in Los Angeles, the Inland Empire, and San Diego.
Illinois: judicial sales with dollar amounts attached
Illinois mirrors Florida's judicial model, and its court-ordered sale calendar spans all 102 counties. Listings carry the case number, sale date and time, opening bid where set, and — after the auction — the disposition: whether the lender took the property back as REO or a third-party bidder bought it. That post-sale signal is quietly valuable, because a lender-repossessed property is still a distressed asset with a motivated institutional seller.
Illinois runs more than 500 upcoming sales on a rolling three-month window — over 1,000 records including recent dispositions — with Cook County the volume center.
Texas: tax sales are the open door
Texas is the outlier. Its mortgage foreclosures are non-judicial and fast — first-Tuesday-of-the-month sales with notices filed at 254 individual county clerks, most of them as scanned documents with no statewide index. Free, structured access to Texas mortgage-foreclosure notices essentially doesn't exist; that dataset is locked up by paid services.
Tax foreclosures are a different story. Delinquent-tax suits end in judicial sales, and the law firms that run them for Texas counties publish structured sale lists: address, cause number, sale date, minimum bid, and appraised value. Across 41 counties — San Antonio's Bexar and Dallas among the largest — that's 300+ properties headed to auction with the minimum bid printed next to the appraisal, which makes the equity math unusually transparent.
What weekly refresh actually buys
Distress lists rot fast. Sales get canceled when borrowers cure, postponed by bankruptcy filings, and continued by courts — in California, postponement is the norm, not the exception. A list pulled monthly is a list of phone calls to owners whose sale evaporated three weeks ago.
Every source above is re-crawled weekly, canceled sales are dropped, and postponed dates are updated in place. Aggregate coverage across the five states currently stands at more than 4,500 active records, each linked to the property it encumbers — browsable free, with the case-level detail and owner contact available on a pay-per-property basis.
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