‘I feel like I’ve been robbed’: The sheriff’s office still has massive delays in processing deeds from auctions.

First, they said there was no problem. Then, they acknowledged there was a major problem, but promised to fix it.

They have not fixed it.

Four months after Philadelphia Sheriff Rochelle Bilal’s office pledged to take “corrective action” to resolve widespread delays in recording deeds after property auctions, the process remains broken. For some buyers, it’s gotten even worse.

Banks, real estate attorneys, construction financiers, real estate agents, and individual buyers tell The Inquirer they are having to wait for up to a year after sheriff sales to take possession of buildings and land.

The problem: Properties are being auctioned off at sheriff sales, but Bilal’s office is not finalizing the sales until many months later, when it finally sends the deeds to the city’s records department.

Why it matters: During that period, empty homes cannot be renovated, demolished, rented, or resold. Vacant lots go undeveloped. Stalled construction sites accumulate trash. Buildings sustain weather damage or are taken over by squatters.

“It’s keeping new owners from doing anything with the properties,” said Mary Jo Potts, a foreclosure specialist at Elfant Wissahickon Realtors who resells properties on behalf of banks. “They’re sitting there and failing apart. It’s causing a lot of blight in Philadelphia.”

In suburban counties, the process of drafting and recording a deed to complete a sheriff sale typically takes a month or two after an auction. That used to be the case in Philadelphia. But, under Bilal, the system has slowed to a near halt at times.

Why is it happening? No one will say.

Neither Bilal nor anyone in Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s administration would provide an explanation for what has gone wrong. Bid4Assets, a private company contracted to conduct online auctions for the sheriff’s office, did not respond to a request for comment.

One attorney representing a lender to commercial developers recently notified the city’s law department that he intends to depose Bilal if he cannot get answers.

“I don’t know what they’re doing at the sheriff’s office at this point,” Potts said. “We’re like a year behind.”

An Inquirer analysis in July found that, in February and March of this year, the sheriff’s office submitted just 29 deeds for recording, nearly all of which corresponded to auctions that took place 200 to 300 days prior.

» READ MORE: They bought properties at Philadelphia sheriff sales, but they never got the deed

Bilal’s staff at the time had claimed that the numbers were wrong — “You insist there is a widespread delay, but that is incorrect,” spokesperson Teresa Lundy said in a statement in July — but later backtracked and attributed the delays to an unspecified “staffing error.”

They announced a plan over the summer to conduct an audit of all deeds filed since January 2024.

“Once completed,” Lundy said in July, “the result of the audit and our updated policy will be made public.”

Bilal’s office has subsequently not responded to any requests for information. Attorneys representing banks and other auction winners are now being forced to petition the courts on a case-by-case basis to try to obtain property deeds for their clients.

“I feel like I’ve been robbed,” said one woman who purchased an investment property in March and has yet to receive the deed. She and her husband, like several other buyers who have reached out to The Inquirer this year, requested anonymity out of concern that Bilal’s office could retaliate by deliberately withholding the deeds or causing them problems in future auctions.

“This was from our savings,” she said Thursday of the money they used to bid on the house. “It really bothers me. This was our first property that we purchased, and we were not expecting this to happen.”

In response to questions from The Inquirer, Ava Schwemler, a spokesperson for the city’s law department, provided a one-sentence statement on Thursday that she said was approved by Undersheriff Tariq El-Shabazz: “The Law Department acts as legal counsel to the Sheriff’s Office and therefore represents the Sheriff’s Office in litigation.”

Schwemler said the law department and the mayor’s office had no additional comment.

Daniel Bernheim, a lawyer who is suing the city and Bilal over the delays and is seeking a systemic fix, said he had recently received a “startling” number of calls and emails from people and companies trying to get their deeds after auctions — some waiting up to a year.

“Everybody has a war story,” Bernheim said. “It’s crazy.”

Although the sheriff’s office has recently increased the number of sales it handles each month by restarting auctions of tax-delinquent properties — they had been on hold for years due to a bureaucratic dispute — city records show that the pace of deed processing has failed to keep up.

In October, for example, only 36 deeds from sheriff sales were recorded. But the office has already listed 672 properties for tax or mortgage foreclosure sales next month. The office is also still working through an old backlog, with deeds being recorded this month for auctions that occurred as far back as December 2023.

Bernheim, who also serves as a Lower Merion commissioner, said the city has not provided any specifics about possible solutions.

“I really want to see that this gets resolved. I requested a seat at the table, if there really is a table, to get it done,” Bernheim said. “I’ve had no response.”

James Leonard, the city’s commissioner of records, said the delays are not occurring in his department, which is responsible for finalizing sales by publicly recording deeds.

“All deeds, including Sheriff’s Office deeds, that are submitted in recordable form (i.e., in compliance with state law recording requirements) are recorded within 24 hours of submittal,” Leonard said in an email on Tuesday.

Some institutional buyers have started taking things into their own hands.

A subsidiary of lender Lima One Capital foreclosed on a North Philly investment property in April 2023. After waiting nearly a year without word from the sheriff’s office, lawyers for the firm obtained a court order in February, forcing the sheriff to process a deed within five days. (The sheriff finally submitted a deed 12 days later.)

But smaller buyers can’t always afford legal representation to obtain a deed. These delays can be especially costly for investors who purchase properties with borrowed money — then have to continue paying interest on the loan for months with no property to show for it.

“I’m taking a hit on this. I used a home equity line of credit, and I’m paying for that,” Dave Brown, who purchased a rowhouse at a sheriff sale as a first-time renovation project, told The Inquirer in June. He was supposed to get the deed within 60 to 90 days. It ended up taking seven months.

The problem also affects banks and other lenders who reclaim properties that fail to sell at auction, and it trickles down to would-be homeowners who subsequently enter into contracts to purchase those properties. Those buyers are often not willing to wait a year to settle on a home. Weather damage can occur in empty homes.

“I’ve lost a lot of sales,” said Helene Lazarus, a real estate agent who has been hired to resell foreclosed properties. “People are just not waiting. They’re dropping out.”

“We have not seen any improvement,” a manager at a capital provider for construction projects and investment properties said last week. He requested anonymity to protect his clients from possible retaliation. “In fact, the delays have worsened over time. … These delays have a direct bearing on our ability to sell these properties to provide additional housing options and growth for a sorely needed boost for the city.”

The ongoing delays are the latest in a series of breakdowns in the sheriff’s office, including misappropriated funds, lax courthouse security, mishandled domestic-abuse cases, and allegations of missing guns.

Clayton Pronold, a lawyer who represents mortgage servicing companies, said he has sat on dozens of properties throughout the year that would have been resold if the sheriff’s office would have recorded the deeds. He said earlier this month that the problem hasn’t gotten any better.

He gets calls from out-of-state clients who are unaware of the level of dysfunction in the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office. They think there is someone he can talk to to move things along.

“They’re saying, ‘Why isn’t the deed recorded?’” Pronold said. “And I’m like, ‘You don’t understand.’”