As a purchaser of properties that counties are preparing to sell during a tax sale, would a quitclaim deed be appropriate to use if my intentions are not to harm the current owners?

Fr_Chuck

The county that you purchase will have thier own requirements for deed, most will be on special or tax deeds. Also remember that in many places you do not get the deed at the time of sale you only get a tax certificate that you have to hold for a number of years before you can redeem them for the property.

and of course you are "harming" the current owners, since you are taking the property away from them by buying that property for the taxes due.
They lose thier ownership either at the tax sale or by failure to redeem in the time required.

deedgrabber

I'm not sure the last poster's answer was what you were looking for. If you were talking about buying a property from a tax sale directly, then it was more on point.

Yes, using a quitclaim deed to purchase property that is about to go to a tax sale would be the appropriate choice. If you use a warranty or other deed you may be committing the owner of the property to warrant clear title, which it sounds like you aren't trying to do.

By the way, I don't know if you stumbled onto this property or deliberately searched out owners losing the property to tax sale, but buying property from people about to lose property to tax sale is the most profitable investing niches I've found. You'll get tons of people walking away from property who will deed it to you for as little as $10, subject to the taxes owed.