by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

If you don't pay your municipal taxes - as 1,800 Montreal island deadbeat landowners recently found out - the city will publish your name and address in the newspaper, advertise the amount you failed to cough up and then seize your property and sell it to the highest bidder at city hall on November 10 at 10 a.m.

This year the prize of the auction should be the Iraqi consulate at 100 Somerville, on which $10,503.14 in back taxes remain unpaid. Barring a last-minute payment, the city will sell the property off in spite of pleas from local Iraqis not to.

About 150 people show up to the annual tax auction, according to Montreal management consultant Pierre Boutin. Anybody with the appropriate certified cheques can bid on and buy properties, which often go for anywhere from $500 to $180,000.

The method cities employ to collect unpaid property taxes varies from one extreme to another. For example, in 1995, Longueuil refused to seize and sell two commercial properties in spite of being owed $113,000 in unpaid taxes. In contrast, Winnipeg seized and sold a residence to a city employee the same year. The owner - who had forgotten to pay a $1,000 tax bill - tried unsuccessfully to go to the Supreme Court to get the property back.

Local bargain hunters will find Montreal's system rigged to allow the tax defaulters every chance to keep their homes. "Our goal here at the city is to collect the taxes and not sell off the building," says Boutin.

The list of properties that are up for auction are only published in the September 10 edition of Le Devoir (a few other addresses are added on October 8). Copies are of the list are not distributed by the city or put online.

Only about 35 to 50 of the 1,800 listed in the paper will actually go up for sale at the city auction. Between the time their address is listed and the auction, about 96 per cent of the tax delinquents will have paid up. Some owners have a habit of running in with their unpaid taxes paid up minutes before their property goes on the block. The city doesn't provide any updated list until the date of the auction, so any time invested in scoping out listed properties (from the outside only - no internal visits are conducted) would almost surely be wasted.

Obstacle three: even if you get a good deal on a house, the previous owner has a year to buy it back from you at the same price you paid plus a 10 per cent penalty. Only after a year has elapsed does the property become irrevocably yours. Boutin says he doesn't know what percentage of homes are bought back by prior owners but another official estimates that total to be "about half."

Montreal now performs the task of auctioning off properties in the island's former municipalities where such transactions were almost unheard of. Officials from Outremont, Westmount, Town of Mount Royal and Côte-St-Luc all said they could only recall one such sale in each of their former cities over the last 20 or so years.