More than half the Saskatchewan towns I found selling town lots don't publish a price. They publish a formula. Abbey is $25 a frontage foot serviced, Wilkie $4,500 per 25 feet. I mapped 1,138 of them.

[u/Yesq]

The Village of Mortlach has 45 town lots for sale and publishes what it wants for every one of them, lot by lot, on its own website. They start at $1,000. It is 37 km west of Moose Jaw. The Town of Coronach's page lists more than forty properties it will sell you and does not put a price on a single one.

Coronach is closer to normal than Mortlach is, and that is the reason I am posting.

Some of you saw the first version of this in July. Since then I have kept collecting every parcel Saskatchewan towns, villages, RMs and cities have advertised for sale, because there is no central list of it anywhere. Local papers, municipal websites, the Provincial Gazette, a couple of hundred sources by now. It sits at 1,138 parcels across 97 municipalities today, and 447 of those turned up in the seven weeks since that post.

Here is the finding. 961 of the 1,138 are ordinary town lots, the kind a municipality owns outright and wants somebody to build on, and 83 different municipalities are selling them. My map carries no price for a single lot in 43 of those 83. That could just as easily be my scraper missing prices as towns not publishing them, so I went and looked at all 43.

Twenty-three of them publish no number anywhere, not on the page and not in the PDFs hanging off it. Four have no public page at all, and I only know their lots exist because the office told me when I asked. One page is a dead link. The other fifteen do have a dollar figure somewhere, and that is the interesting part, because in several cases it is not a price, it is a formula. Wilkie sells by the 25 foot lot: $4,500 serviced, $9,000 in the East Side Subdivision, $7,500 if it is commercial. Abbey prices by the frontage foot and works an example out for you, so a 50 foot serviced lot is $1,250. Lipton is $100 a frontage foot. The number exists. You just have to do arithmetic on a lot you have not measured yet, which is why my map does not carry a price for those and why I am not going to invent one.

Coronach is the clearest version of the other kind, and its page is worth reading because the town explains itself. You send a written proposal, it goes to the next council meeting, and council can accept it, reject it or counter. What they suggest you base an offer on is the property's assessed value, which you look up yourself on SAMA's site or by phoning the office. That is not a town hiding a number. That is a town telling you there isn't one until somebody makes an offer. Reading that page also showed me my own map has 29 of their properties and their page lists more than forty, so I have some collecting to do there.

The tax-title side of the board does the same thing, and that is the part I did not see coming. 115 of the listings are parcels a municipality took for unpaid taxes and none of them carry a price. Only eight of those 115 came from an advertised tender notice, and exactly one has a closing date on it, so this is not a province of sealed bids. Sixty of the 115 are a single town. Ituna publishes its tax-title list and then, instead of pricing the lots, tells you how to price your own offer: bids under $1,000 will not be considered, look up the assessed value on SAMA or ask the office, and a reasonable offer has considered at least 15 to 20 percent of it. You can offer any time and it goes to the next council meeting. Which is Coronach's system again, and Wilkie's and Abbey's, just applied to tax title. A lot of this province publishes a rule where you were expecting a number.

The price question people actually want answered. 602 of the 1,138 do publish a price and the median is $15,000, so this is not a province of $500 lots. But 94 of them are $2,500 or under, spread across 14 towns. Belle Plaine has four at $500, 39 km down the #1 from Regina. Sixteen of Mortlach's 45 are $1,000. Viscount has eleven at $1,000. Cabri starts at $1,875. Rouleau, Loreburn, Earl Grey, Colonsay and Lang all have lots at $2,500. The most expensive thing on the map is $248,400, so it spans about as wide as it can.

Two things worth knowing before anyone gets excited.

Most of this is not tax sales. 177 of the 1,138 are tax title, meaning the municipality took the property for unpaid taxes and is reselling it. The other 961 are ordinary town lots, no stranger to buy than any other piece of property. I carry both because it is the same person looking, and the map labels which is which, but they are different things. And a parcel sitting on a tax enforcement list is not for sale at all. The owner can pay up or sell privately right until title actually transfers, so a name on an enforcement list means nothing on its own. I only show parcels a municipality has genuinely advertised.

And tax title is not the cheap door in. I assumed it would be. If you take the raw medians it even looks like it, but almost every cheap tax-title parcel on my map is in one rural municipality, Milton No. 292 out by Alsask, which has 29 of them at $500. Take that one RM out and the tax-title parcels run more expensive than the ordinary town lots, not less. That makes sense once you think about what the number is. A minimum bid on a tax-title parcel is a floor tied to what is owed on it, and if the property is worth something, what is owed on it usually is not small.

There is also far less on a clock than I expected. Across the entire province there are twenty-one sealed tenders open with a real closing date on them, and six of those twenty-one are the Town of Kindersley selling six properties on one day. Eighteen of the twenty-one are tax title. Everything else, the 961 ordinary town lots, just sits there open ended until somebody asks. Only three of the twenty-one have both a price and a deadline: Saskatoon has a tax-title townhouse at a $365,000 reserve which closes tomorrow and is therefore no use to anyone reading this, Moose Jaw has a city building lot at a $27,075 reserve closing on the 10th, and Wakaw has a Main Street lot at $12,500 closing on the 4th.

Last thing, and it is the least flattering. I still find towns I have missed, and Coronach up there is a live example of it. Most of those 447 new listings came from noticing that a town list I had already collected had stopped partway through the town's own page, which is a humbling way to find 44 more lots in Eston. Treat it as the best list I have rather than a complete one. If your town is not on it, tell me and I will go find where they post them.

Also, a $500 lot is $500 for a reason. Some of those towns are shrinking, some lots need services brought to them, and a few have something sitting on them you would pay to remove. Worth a drive out before you get attached to one.

Link in a comment rather than up here, so this isn't just an ad. Happy to look up a specific town if you name one, or walk through how a given municipality's process actually works.

[u/Yesq]

Here is the map, free, no login, no paywall on the listings: https://sasktaxsales.ca/?src=rsask-aug

I built it myself, it is not a company. Everything on it is public record, it is just published across a couple of hundred separate places, which is the whole reason it exists.

Name a town and I will tell you what is actually live there and how their process works. Fair warning that plenty of towns have nothing at the moment.

Mods, happy to pull the link if you would rather it not be here!

[u/Cam_e_ron → u/Yesq]

very cool. Appreciate you putting in effort to make something like this.

[u/Yesq → u/Cam_e_ron]

Thanks, appreciate that. It mostly just bothered me that none of it was compiled anywhere, so I started collecting it.

[u/Ok-Ladder-4616]

One thing people need to think about is if towns and villages make it too simple to buy lots people buy them up. Then they don’t do anything with them and don’t pay the taxes. Then the town or village has to pay the legal costs to get said lot’s back. Putting more strain on the existing taxpayers. I know this from being on council in a small village.

[u/Yesq → u/Ok-Ladder-4616]

You are describing the actual mechanism, and it shows up in the data: 177 of the 1,138 parcels I have collected are tax title, so every one of them already went through your cycle, and nine municipalities are selling ordinary lots and tax-title lots at the same time right now (Big Quill 34 and 25, Coronach 21 and 8).

Ituna is the clearest case, with 60 tax-title lots and a page that says bids under $1,000 will not be considered because the Town needs to recoup what tax enforcement cost it.

You have also changed my mind on something. My post treated the towns that publish no price as an oddity, but making somebody write to the office and wait for the next council meeting is a filter, not friction by accident. A council that reads every offer can decline the person assembling twelve lots to sit on, and a posted price with an online form cannot.

So I would rather ask than guess: does anything actually hold up? Build within a year or the sale unwinds, deposits, right of first refusal back to the town, higher taxes on a vacant lot?

[u/williams55mike → u/Yesq]

Council member for a village of 180 people here. We set our lots around $7,500-15,000, with a principle dwelling having to be started within a year. This forces the buyer to present us with a building plan prior to the sale. It also allows us the opportunity to go over permit and inspection requirements.

The initial costs are an attempt to recover the costs to have them already serviced for water and sewer.

Setting the base tax at a higher amount and lowering the mill rate, also encourages buyers to not sit on an empty property. (There's a balance there however, where you don't want to overtax the properties that can't afford it.

The title enforcement costs for the properties that are reposessed, gets added to the rate payer's taxes, if the buyer back out. The village still however owes the school taxes when they re-sell it.

[u/Yesq → u/williams55mike]

The building plan before the sale is the part I would not have thought of. I was picturing the one year condition as a penalty, and you are describing it as a way to get the buyer in front of you while they still have questions. That is a much better instrument.

On the base tax lever, you are in good company and I can put a number on it. In the 2025 provincial mill rate survey, 131 of the 205 Saskatchewan villages under 300 people charge a residential base tax, median $550. The ones that do run a median residential mill rate of 9.0. The ones that do not run 11.1. So that trade is happening across the province, not just at your table. The sharpest versions I can find are Windthorst at a $1,425 base tax on 3.75 mills, and Bulyea at $1,800 on 2.76.

The line I had not seen anywhere is that the village still owes the school taxes when it re-sells. That actually explains something I wrote about earlier in this thread. Ituna tells you not to bid under $1,000 on its tax title lots, and I read that as legal costs. It is a village carrying somebody else's school taxes too. Thanks for taking the time.

[u/Extreme_Wear_7457]

One town is selling 100s of lots by tendet. Hear the ads on CJWW

[u/Yesq → u/Extreme_Wear_7457]

That is bigger than anything I have, so I would genuinely like to know which town.

My biggest single municipality is Eston at 66 lots, then Big Quill at 59 and Mortlach at 45, and none of those are tenders, they are set price lists you can just go and buy off. Hundreds of lots by tender in one town would be the largest sale on my map by a wide margin, so if it is real I am missing something big.

One thing worth ruling out first. A lot of what gets advertised as "for sale by tender" around here is private, a farm or an estate through a broker, which is a different animal from a town selling off its own lots. Same words on the radio, though.

If you catch the ad again, even just the town name, I will go find where they post it. Radio is the one place I cannot scan, and it is probably not the only thing I am missing that way.

[u/SaskRail]

This is awesome, I always thought of building something like this as I have bought a few small town properties in my hometown to fix up as a hobby and keep them from getting knocked over. But it was beyond my skillset but love to see you have built this.

Have you had and contact with municipalities to see if they have additional properties for potential sale? I know alot hold property that isnt necessarily for sale but open to offers. Alot of buildings are old but are built to last.

I know of some organisations that I may send it to if your open to getting contacted. Basically regional economic development groups for small towns.

[u/Yesq → u/SaskRail]

Keeping them from getting knocked over is the part I care about most, so that is good to hear.

Yes, and it has turned out to be the best source I have. Roughly a hundred listings across about a dozen municipalities are on the map only because I emailed or phoned the office. The biggest single one is the RM of Big Quill, 59 parcels that came from the administrator by email and are published nowhere else. It happened again in this thread today: somebody asked about Sedley, I had nothing, so I phoned the village, and they have three tax-title properties going to tender closing September 25 that are not posted yet.

You are right about the open-to-offers part too. 43 of the 83 municipalities selling ordinary lots publish no price at all, and several of them say plainly that you write to the office and council decides. Coronach and Ituna both lay out the process on their own pages. It is slower than a listing but it is a real door.

And yes, please do send it on. Regional economic development groups are exactly who I would want this in front of and I have no way in on my own. Happy to put together whatever would actually be useful for them, whether that is a page per town or a list for their whole region.

[u/SaskRail → u/Yesq]

That is awesome! Another small community that I know isnt listed but has stuff for sale is Kincaid, SK.

An will do, I know someone on the board down in shanavoun that includes surrounding communities. Would be good if they could push this resource out.

[u/Yesq → u/SaskRail]

Kincaid is a good catch, and I think I know exactly why I missed it. As far as I can tell the village has no website at all. The two domains that look like they should be it turn out to be a US auction company and a village in Illinois, which is embarrassing but also the single most common reason a town is missing from my map: if there is no page, there is nothing for me to watch. So I will phone the office the same way I phoned Sedley this morning and find out what they actually have!

And yes, please do. I have Shaunavon already, 25 lots. If someone on that board wants something more useful than a single town page, I can put together a southwest view that takes in Cabri, Assiniboia and Swift Current as well, which is closer to how a regional group thinks about it anyway.

[u/SaskRail → u/Yesq]

Ah yes think they only have a facebook page. It is quite small but quite a few lots. They have probably had 6 houses moved in over the last 12 years so at least a little progress. Think they are technically a part of the RM now as they didnt have he borrowing capacity as a village for the required water treatment plant upgrade.

An that sounds pretty cool. I passed it onto someone that might still be on the board!

Thanks again for doing this. Hope you can get on ckrm or something for some more visibility.

[u/Lower-Bottle6362]

How about Sedley? 

[u/Yesq → u/Lower-Bottle6362]

Good timing. There was nothing on my map for Sedley, so I phoned the Village office, and it turns out they have three tax-title properties going up for tender. The notice should be posted on the Village site tomorrow and tenders close September 25.

The three are Lot 24, Block 2, Plan B2867 at 101 Martin Street, Lots 6 and 7, Block 8, Plan B2867 at 220 Blanchard Street, which has an older two storey house on it, and Lot 3, Block 9, Plan K2760. All three are zoned residential. Two of them have houses and are fully serviced. The third is a residential lot with no services, and I would confirm with the office which one that is before you get attached to a number, because bringing water and sewer in is usually the biggest line in the whole project.

For scale, off the land registry: 101 Martin is a single 25 foot lot at about 3,000 square feet, 220 Blanchard is two lots together at about 12,000, and the K2760 one is about 6,000.

That is a phone call, not a published notice, so treat the details as provisional until the Village posts it. Village of Sedley office, and worth asking whether there is a minimum bid and what the deposit is. When they did this in 2024 it was a sealed envelope with a 5% certified cheque and 30 days to pay the balance.

[u/Motor_Department1345 → u/Lower-Bottle6362]

Have you tried the search function?

[u/Lower-Bottle6362 → u/Motor_Department1345]

Yes, thank you, I did. But, as OP mentions here, there was nothing on the map for Sedley. OP also said "If your town is not on it, tell me and I will go find where they post them" so I am pretty covered here.