The Philadelphia Sheriff used to transfer deeds several weeks after the sale. Now it takes six months or more.

Last November, Dave Brown bought a townhouse in Oxford Circle at a sheriff's auction as part of a first-time renovation project.

Brown, 54, who works for a local utility company, borrowed some of the $143,429 needed to buy the property. The deed was supposed to be transferred within 60 to 90 days.

It took seven months, due to unexplained delays at the sheriff's office. As of last week, he was still trying to get a copy of the deed, which was only recently registered. In the meantime, he's paying interest on the loan.

“A debacle,” Brown said, describing his experience buying a home at an auction hosted by Sheriff Rochelle Bilal’s office.

Buyers like Brown, who sometimes spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for a foreclosed property at auction, are left without a deed for months, according to an analysis of city records and interviews with bidders, attorneys and real estate agents. The waiting buyers can’t access the properties, make repairs or rent them out.

The deed recording process, which historically took about six to eight weeks to complete after a Philadelphia sheriff's sale, can now take about seven months or more.

“I'm taking a hit,” he said. “I used a home equity line of credit and I'm paying for it.”

Bid4Assets, an online auction company that Bilal's staff uses for sheriff's sales, tells Philadelphia buyers that deeds can now take up to 90 days to be recorded.

But the Inquirer's analysis of more than 130 auction records recorded between October 2023 and March 2024 found that their auctions took place, on average, just over 200 days earlier.

” LEARN MORE: Philadelphia's sheriff hasn't held a tax auction in years, with the city saying it's costing it millions.

Other buyers have reported similar experiences. They have tried calling and going to the Broad Street Sheriff's Office, but have received little explanation or resolution.

The new foreclosure delays come on top of an ongoing freeze on most tax-delinquent property auctions: Bilal's office has failed to auction hundreds of tax-delinquent properties for more than three years, costing the city tens of millions of dollars in lost tax revenue and contributing to the city's disrepair.

The sheriff is set to resume those tax sales later this month, which would significantly increase his workload.

A spokeswoman for Mayor Cherelle L. Parker declined to comment on the issue last week, referring questions to the sheriff's office.

Bilal did not respond to requests for comment. His spokeswoman, Teresa Lundy, did not provide an explanation for the delays or acknowledge that there was a widespread problem.

“Individuals who have not received documents should contact our office and we can provide further details as to why their documents were not processed in a timely manner,” Lundy wrote via email.

Bid4Assets CEO Jesse Loomis did not respond to requests for comment.

Concerns about retaliation

Buyers and their representatives contacted by The Inquirer declined to speak by name, saying they feared the sheriff's office would make it even harder for them to buy properties in the future — or to obtain deeds to properties they've already paid for.

“It’s completely crazy,” said one real estate investor who bought a property in South Philadelphia in December. The deed has not yet been recorded.

In Delaware and Montgomery counties, deeds are typically recorded one to two months after the sheriff's sale. In Philadelphia, deeds were processed on a similar schedule.

“If it was two months, or even three, it would be fine, because that's what they told me. But it's been seven months now,” said the investor, who said he felt like a “financial hostage.”

“It’s ridiculous,” said another investor who waited seven months to get a deed for a property he bought with borrowed money. “I don’t know what went wrong in that office.”

“It’s like an episode of Seinfeld,” said one real estate agent after a recent visit to the office in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain a deed from last year. “If you ran a business like this, you’d be out of business.”

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The “recorded deeds” section of the sheriff’s office website, which does not appear to have been updated since January 2021, repeatedly warns readers that a face mask is required to come to the office, but provides no useful information about the deeds.

“The Sheriff’s Office will STRICTLY enforce scheduled appointments ONLY,” the site states.

Software switch

The delays appear to be related to the sheriff's office's decision to replace case management software implemented by the previous administration.

Sheriff John Green, who resigned in 2011 following a federal corruption investigation and later admitted to taking $675,000 in bribes, left the department’s finances in shambles. His successor, Sheriff Jewell Williams, elected in 2011, hired a software company called Teleosoft to help clean up the mess.

According to a 2022 city comptroller report, that system was known as CountySuite, but was later renamed the Judicial Enforcement Writ Execution Legal Ledger — “JEWELL,” a nod to Williams’ first name — and was used to “record financial activity related to individual properties sold by the sheriff.”

” LEARN MORE: Timeline: The history of the scandal-plagued Philadelphia Sheriff's Office.

“Within a year, the sales process became predictable,” Cory Fregm, Teleosoft’s chief executive, said last week. “We could run a sheriff’s sale from start to finish in a predictable time frame.”

The software was not without its problems, according to the controller's audit. It found that officials had taken to using the software as an informal accounting system, even though it lacked key features, such as the ability to generate traditional financial statements.

Last year, Bilal abandoned this software suite. The system was officially taken offline in April 2023, Fregm said.

City records show that the number of deeds received from the sheriff dropped almost immediately, while processing times began to increase.

In recent months, filings have seemed to have come to a virtual standstill. For the entire months of February and March, the office submitted only 29 acts for registration, almost all of which corresponded to auctions that had taken place between 200 and 300 days earlier.

Joseph Vignola, a former Williams city comptroller and undersheriff who helped implement the Teleosoft system, was surprised to learn buyers were waiting so long for deeds to be recorded.

“Wow,” Vignola said. “We managed to do it in 20 days” after the settlement.

More sales to come

The problem appears to have worsened despite the fact that Bilal, who took office in 2020, is holding far fewer auctions than his predecessor.

Before the pandemic, the sheriff's office auctioned thousands of properties each year; nearly 4,700 The deeds related to the sheriff's sales were recorded between May 2018 and May 2019, according to city records.

From May 2023 to May 2024, the city only processed 647 acts submitted by the sheriff.

Most of the outstanding tax sales have been pending since April 2021, after Bilal’s staff attempted to award a no-bid contract to Bid4Assets without the involvement of city attorneys. That led to a protracted dispute with City Hall that froze the sales.

Although the city approved a revised contract between the office and Bid4Assets that will pave the way for those sales to resume later this month, it's unclear whether the sheriff's office will be able to handle the increased volume.

Last month, Tyler Technologies, the software company hired by the sheriff's office to replace Teleosoft, announced that it had gone live with its management system after nine months of implementation. The press release said the software included “streamlined property data and financial capabilities.”

“By leveraging cutting-edge technology, we are committed to creating a smarter, more efficient and more connected community,” Bilal said in the statement.

Bilal's spokesman did not respond to questions about whether acts could be registered more quickly with the new system in place.

In the meantime, the sheriff continues to collect fees associated with these sales, whether or not the buyers have obtained a bill of sale.

An Inquirer investigation in April found that the bureau was taking millions of dollars in auction fees into bank accounts outside the city's control, and spending them on expenses such as DJs, catering, ammunition and a $9,000 costume for a bureau mascot.

Brown, the buyer who waited seven months for a deed, said the sheriff's office should be upfront with bidders at the auction about when they will become the official owners of the property if they win.

“What’s fair is fair,” Brown said. “If you say it might take 150 days, it’s going to deter some people, but at least they’ll know.”

Staff writer Chris A. Williams contributed to this article.