Maria Salatto-Gilhuly
Name: Maria R. Salatto-Gilhuly
Title: Attorney, The Marcus Law Firm
Age: 27
Industry experience: 3 years
A holiday shift at Maria Salatto-Gilhuly’s family’s business provided an opportunity for career networking, and an eventual job offer to join the Marcus Law Firm of Branford as a tax lien specialist. As a law student working Easter Sunday at her mother’s catering business, Salatto-Gilhuly bumped into Edward Marcus, founder of the Marcus Law Firm, who encouraged her to apply for a job after she graduated from New York University School of Law. Now in her third year with the firm, the Branford native helps clients satisfy approximately 500 liens a year, primarily in cities such as Bridgeport, West Haven, Hartford and Danbury.
Q: What are the most prevalent types of tax liens you’re working on with clients?
A: The two main kinds are property taxes and sewer liens, either through the municipality itself or the local sewer authority. In Connecticut, it’s hard because the taxes are so high and people struggle paying their mortgage. If they’re looking to sell the home, the difficult thing is the lien has to be paid at closing. It becomes more difficult when there’s more than one tax year and the property value isn’t that high. One option is to set up a payment schedule for the lien and they can break off the tax debt from the money due at closing. The interest rate is 18 percent per year on the taxes, so even if they can afford to pay the taxes, sometimes they can’t afford to pay the interest.
Q: Who’s willing to buy the liens?
A: It depends on the municipality. There’s four or five key tax lien players in the industry. They’re national players and they do this in Connecticut and other states. You would set up a payment plan with them through an attorney. When a municipality puts the lien up for sale, they bid on it.
Q: What are the typical payment plan terms?
A: Usually, 15 months would be the most. It’s just their business model. They are getting interest on the liens, but they don’t want to sit on them any longer. They want to get their money paid back. It gets costly for the municipality if they hold onto the lien. In a foreclosure process, they have to hire an in-house or out-of-house attorney, and that can run into thousands of dollars. Communities don’t have the manpower or the finances. When they sell the liens, they get the money immediately. Not all municipalities sell liens. I think they all should, but only the bigger ones tend to.
Q: Is it worth trying to negotiate a settlement with the lien filer?
A: I usually have to run it by my client. (Lien holders) usually don’t tend to take a settlement for a lower amount. They accept a larger down payment, or equal monthly payments, but they usually don’t (accept settlements), because it’s taxes and it’s a state statute interest rate, so there’s not a lot of wiggle room. They’re entitled to it.
Q: Do liens get resold to multiple investors?
A: Every now and then, they get sold to another investor group. If you have one investor who has four years, and another who has one year on the same property, sometimes they’ll sell to the other.
Q: Who’s the biggest private investor in liens?
A: FIG Capital is new to the Connecticut market. They came in and outbid everybody because they were really eager to get into Connecticut. They’ve bid and won in every municipality this year – 10 out of 10. Usually they pay a 10 percent premium on top of the liens and interest.
Q: What’s the statute of limitations on liens?
A: Once they are filed, they are good for 15 years. And if you were to start a foreclosure, you would have to start it within those 15 years.
Q: How does a bankruptcy filing affect the treatment of tax liens?
A: What happens in bankruptcy is that it stays everything. In Chapter 13, they could build the taxes into the payment plan. It might give them more time to pay them, but that’s about it.
Salatto-Gilhuly’s Five Favorite Vacation Spots:
- Paris
- Maui
- Venice
- Positano, Italy
- Palm Desert, California
