Palle St Cyer

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:Hey Palle St Cyer. At first glance, this looks like an amazing resource.

Pardon the reticence of forum members to give "likes." Various schemes come through here daily. It might be an altruistic gesture, or it might be a hook. So it's fair to ask how you pay the bills to host your site, and what your ultimate objective is?

Fair question, Douglas, and I would rather you ask it than quietly assume the worst. The reticence makes sense, and honestly it is healthy.

To the what-do-you-do part first, since it answers the bills question too: I do brand development for businesses for a living. That is the day job, which means the map does not have to pay for itself. It is self funded and self built, out of my own pocket, and cheap to run, a few dollars a month. I am not making money on it today, and the listings, the town, the method, the closing date, the legal description, the price, are all free and will stay free. Putting those behind a wall would defeat the whole point. If it ever needs to cover its costs, that would be optional extras for heavy repeat buyers, never gating the public record.

I am new here, so the caution seems fair to me. And if brand work has taught me anything, it is that being straight with people beats trying to win them over, so that is all I am doing.

The objective is simple enough: help people find this land, build the one province wide record of it that has never existed, and, the part I care about most, help the towns and RMs quietly sitting on empty lots they would love to get back on the tax roll and into someone's hands. When it works, the buyer, the town and the map all come out ahead.

No investor, no data sold out the back, just a thing I got tired of not being able to find and built!

John C Daley wrote:what a great idea and service.

Thank you, John! I appreciate that. Hoping others find it useful as well.

I've been quietly chewing on the same question a lot of people here have: what is the actual cheapest way to legally get your own patch of ground in Canada? Somewhere to put a cabin, a garden, eventually more.

The answer I kept circling back to isn't Crown land or the classifieds. It's municipal tax sales, and I think a few of you will find the mechanic as interesting as I did.

When someone stops paying property taxes on a parcel long enough, the town or rural municipality can eventually take title and resell it, usually by sealed tender or auction, purely to recover the back taxes. In Saskatchewan that means serviced village lots, and the occasional larger parcel, changing hands for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. That is not a typo.

The catch, and the reason most people never find these: there is no central list. Every town and RM advertises its own sales on its own schedule, usually buried in a local weekly newspaper or a PDF on a municipal website, sometimes only in the provincial gazette. By the time word reaches anyone outside that town, the tender has already closed.

So I spent way too long building a free map that pulls all of Saskatchewan's into one place, with optional email alerts when new ones show up in a region you care about. No login, and no paywall on the listings: https://sasktaxsales.ca/?src=permies

A few honest things up front, because I would want to know them:
- A parcel on a tax-enforcement list is NOT the same as for sale. The owner can pay up or sell right until title actually transfers, so I only flag the ones genuinely advertised for sale.
- Most are small town or village lots (a place to put a tiny home, a base, a big garden), not turnkey 160-acre homesteads, though bigger parcels do come up.
- Everything is as-is. Do your own title, access and condition homework before you bid.
- Saskatchewan restricts farmland ownership to Canadian residents (non-residents are capped at 10 acres), but town and village lots are not farmland, so they are open to out-of-province and non-Canadian buyers alike. If you are reading this from the US, the small lots are the ones on the table for you.

I am not selling anything (the map is free), I just figured this community of all places would appreciate a cheap-land mechanic that flies under the radar. Happy to walk through how the tender process actually works for a specific town if anyone is curious.

Thanks for posting this Jeff, I'm in Saskatchewan and hadn't caught it. Nice to see a food forest going in here. Our season is short but the native stuff like saskatoons and chokecherries really thrives, and haskap has done well all over the province too. Going to keep an eye on how theirs comes along.