Friday morning started like any normal day for Carol Stiasny. She woke before the sun rose and left for work by 6:30 a.m. – going through the motions to keep her mind off the reality that soon she’d need moving boxes.

By 2 p.m., while she was finishing up her shift as a rehabilitation aide at Catholic Medical Center, her two-bedroom single-wide manufactured home was sold at auction by the City of Concord for $9,000. She’d fallen behind on her property taxes a few years back and never caught up.

It’s a harsh process outlined in New Hampshire state law – when homeowners do not pay their property taxes, the town or city can repossess the asset for a fraction of its value and sell it to the highest bidder to recoup what they are owed.

The City of Concord makes no secret of its desire to collect all owed taxes and fees. Among the city council’s stated goals for 2020 – motives and principles that guide decision-making – is the principle to “aggressively pursue collection of property taxes and all other receivables due the City.”

On Friday, the city sold five properties, including Stiasny’s, that owed a total of $65,113 in property taxes. It is a tiny sliver compared to the city’s $130 million budget, but to the people living in these homes, it was a crushing debt they could not afford.

For Stiasny, she felt there was little she could do to stop the process, other than cough up the $9,635 she owed in back taxes. But that money was not going to appear in her bank account overnight. Instead, the city sent her a clear message.

“It’s not paid now so it’s going up for auction,” she said they told her. “It’s too late now. You can’t do anything.”

Seized and sold

Dawn Enwright is an accountant by trade. Yet years ago, after a career in the financial sector, she decided she wanted to help people. So she became a municipal tax collector.

For the last four years in Concord, Enwright has overseen financial services and property tax collection. It’s a tedious job following dates and deadlines spelled out by state law, but one that keeps her in contact with Concord residents daily – sometimes to their dismay, she admits.

“Taxes are a difficult thing to pay because people have a hard time seeing the benefits they are receiving in relation to the taxes they’re paying,” she said.

Once a property tax bill is past due, interest begins to accrue on the outstanding balance at 8%. After 30 days, a lien can be placed on the property, which ensures the city gets paid if it’s sold. Then, interest jumps to 14%. At the two-year mark, if this lien remains unpaid, the property is deeded, meaning it is now owned in full by the city or town.

Homeowners are notified of this process through a series of notices, sent by certified mail. State law outlines a 30-day notice. In Concord, Enwright will often give a slight extension to homeowners, with a 45 to 60-day warning.

At any point throughout this process, a homeowner can pay off the balance and reclaim their home – up until the auction. 

“We don’t want to own homes,” said Enwright. “But our job is to collect taxes. We have the laws, the laws dictate what we shall do.”

In October, the City of Concord seized the properties and notified owners that they would go to auction by the end of January. Taxes owed on the properties ranged from $4,518 to $25,857, totaling $65,113.

For context, the amount owed on Friday’s five properties totaled about 0.1% of the $46.5 million the city collected in property taxes in 2023. It is equivalent to the base pay for a police officer and is less than a third of the city manager’s annual salary. 

Throughout the process Enwright offered to connect the homeowners to the city’s human services department and had assistance applications printed in her office and mailed to each home, she said.

Two property owners avoided the January 26 auction date. One paid off the taxes with help from a state program, the Homeowner Assistance Fund, which was created with American Rescue Plan Act dollars to help housing with expenses like property taxes during the pandemic. For the other homeowner, it came down to the wire. He took out a loan last week to stave off the auctioneers.

But for others like Stiasny, a sign announcing the public auction was stuck in the ground outside their house. Bidding on her property started at $2,500.

Auctioned off

At the City Wide Community Center in Concord on Friday, a place where seniors come for aerobics and Zumba classes, Jim St. Jean took the microphone and kicked off the bidding.

It’s a service he’s done hundreds of times over the last 42 years for cities and towns across the state.

St. Jean, who runs JSJ Auctions with his brother Jay, is hired by cities like Concord to dispose of tax-deeded properties. They receive 7.5% of the sale price for each tax deeded property sold, paid by the new buyer. Prior to the auction, the company surveys the properties, advertises the sale and notifies interested buyers of what to expect.

At each auction, a few bidders are consistent characters, said St. Jean. Through the state, investors like Brian Blake purchase and resell these deeded properties with the intent of providing new affordable housing in the area.

On Friday, Blake, who is based in Concord, bought a vacant manufactured home off of Manchester Street for $42,500 that was valued by the city at $53,100. He has been in the investment business for 35 years, since he was 18 years old, he said.

“I have done this quite a few times and people need affordable housing,” said Blake. “It’s not an outrageous price, so somebody can actually afford to live in Concord.”

Others, like Ron Marchant, will drive all over the state. Based out of Brookline, he refers to the area of the state between Concord, Manchester and Nashua as the golden zone. The more auctions he attended, the more he began to recognize other investors.

Marchant also placed a bid on the Manchester Street property.

What complicated Concord’s auction on Friday was the fact that three out of the five homes were occupied by families. For Marchant, that was a non-starter when it came to bidding.

“It’s not in my business to be evicting people,” he said.

Prior to the auction, the city stated that removing these tenants would be the responsibility of new owners. That means taking them to landlord-tenant court for an eviction process.

A fraction of the value

For some owners like Stiasny, a consistent history of unpaid bills means that what’s owed on the property approaches the total assessed value of the home. When her house was deeded in October, she owed $9,634.88 compared to its assessed value of $14,100.

At auction her house was sold for $9,000 – meaning the majority of her debt will be returned to the city, but not all. Dana Rood, who owns the park Concord Terrace where Stiasny’s house is located, purchased the property.

He also bought another home in the park on Monarch Drive, which owed $4,517 and was valued at $15,200.

Rood, who has owned the park since 1977, plans to sell both properties to new tenants.

“I appreciate what the city is doing. It’s good for everybody,” he said. “When you get behind on taxes it costs other taxpayers money. So what the city is doing by being fair and progressive on the taxes is great for everybody.”

Other properties sold at the auction were seized for a mere fraction of their worth.

On Lake Street in Concord, a five-bedroom single-family home was sold Friday for $280,000. The house, assessed at $332,100, owed just over $25,000 in back taxes, interest and fees – less than 10% of its total value.

And on Hobart Street, a vacant plot of land valued at $82,900, was $11,342 in arrears. It sold for $105,000.

When the sale proceeds exceed the taxes owed, the excess money must be returned to the previous owner after a state supreme court ruling in Polonsky vs. Town of Bedford in 2020. This ensures that municipalities may collect back taxes owed, but not profit off of these sales.

In some cases, former property owners will see a check – which they can put towards a new purchase or rent. But that won’t be the case for Stiasny.

Starting anew

The manufactured home in a park off of Fisherville Road was a new start for Stiasny. She was recently divorced and wanted a place where her three adult sons could stay. It was August of 2015 and she bought it outright for $16,000.

Soon she started to fall behind on her property tax payments. In 2016, she had a lien placed for an outstanding bill of $609.10. With an interest rate of 18%, by the time her property was deeded in 2023, she owed $1,387.19 from this missed payment – with $703 added in interest.

The same happened in 2017. She owed $681 and a lien was placed. That amount nearly doubled, with $639.55 compounded in interest to bring the total to $1,345.

In 2019, state law changed to lower the interest rate to 14%. The way her debt ballooned is what she thinks the city could do differently in the process. Once she fell behind, it felt impossible to catch up as the amount she owed multiplied.

“Come on,” she said. “You don’t need to charge that much in interest.”

Her tax troubles continued as she was furloughed from her job in 2020 due to the pandemic. The timing coincided with her oldest son moving back home. Another person in the house meant more expenses at the grocery store.

“You know, struggling to make ends meet,” she said. “Especially with everything else, it’s so expensive. Things add up.”

Enwright said she tries to work with homeowners who contact her office. She’ll help draft monthly payment plans or determine if there are any credits or exemptions that they qualify for to bring their total bill down.

But Stiasny felt the city did little to communicate these options with her.

“They should have somebody to help people with that. With the pandemic and stuff, people are struggling,” she said. “Nobody helps anybody out. You need to help people and reach out to them and do more.”

Now she will likely face an eviction process in court.

It’s a hard truth to admit for Stiasny, but perhaps selling her house isn’t the worst-case scenario. Along with the taxes, the cost of maintenance and park rent add up. In an apartment, these expenses would fall to the landlord.

“There’s a scenario in which it is a lot more expensive but at this point, you know the trailer needs a lot of work. Some of the electrical doesn’t work. Half the time the hot water doesn’t work,” she said. “Then I don’t have to worry about fixing anything.”

But that’s a change in outlook to what she feared a few months ago. The thought of finding a new place, with a rental vacancy rate of less than 1%, seemed like an impossible feat.

“Where do you go? You’re only giving them a certain amount of time right now to find a place?” she said in December. “You need time to find a place. You’re going to put more people homeless out on the streets?”

Editor’s note: The Concord Monitor, in partnership with Report for America and the Investigating Editing Corps, is working on a series of stories examining the pressure of property taxes. If you have faced a tax deed or lien, or struggled year to year to pay your property tax bill and would like to share your story, please contact reporter Michaela Towfighi at mtowfighi@cmonitor.com.