Sheriff’s Office admits error, plans ‘corrective action’ to fix months-long delays in recording deeds

For the last month, Philadelphia Sheriff Rochelle Bilal claimed that nothing was wrong.

Her staff repeatedly denied the office was having trouble processing deeds after mortgage foreclosure auctions — despite the phone calls and visits from frustrated property buyers, and an Inquirer analysis of city records showing chronic holdups.

“You insist there is a widespread delay, but that is incorrect,” Bilal’s spokesperson wrote in an email Tuesday afternoon.

The Inquirer has reported that some winning bidders at sheriff sales have been waiting seven months or longer to receive the deeds. That process used to take six to eight weeks.

And in response to reporters’ questions about how the slowdown might impact the recent resumption of tax-delinquency sales, Bilal’s legal team suggested that the delays could be caused by the city Records Department’s failure to record the deeds after the Sheriff’s Office submits them.

But, on Wednesday, James Leonard, the city’s commissioner of records, provided The Inquirer with documentation showing that his department has been recording deeds minutes after the Sheriff’s Department submitted them electronically.

Presented with that documentation, Bilal’s staff reversed course and acknowledged that they were wrong, blaming the problem on an unspecified staffing issue.

They are now planning to conduct an audit of every deed filed this year.

“Your persistent questions caused us to delve deeper into this matter, and we discovered that the deeds you provided to our office were delayed due to a staffing error,” Bilal’s spokesperson Teresa Lundy wrote in an email Wednesday. “We are evaluating and updating our current policies and procedures, as well as ensuring that corrective action and training take place.”

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

Some buyers are still waiting for deeds to properties auctioned off as long ago as last September. The problem appears to be widespread.

Bid4Assets, the online auction firm used by the Sheriff’s Office for property sales, tells buyers that it could take as long as 90 days for deeds to be recorded. But an Inquirer analysis of more than 130 sheriff’s deeds recorded between October 2023 and March 2024 found that it has been taking more than 200 days, on average.

In February and March, the office submitted just 29 deeds for recording, nearly all of which corresponded to auctions that occurred between 200 to 300 days prior.

Buyers, attorneys and real estate agents facing delays say they have not received any clear explanations from the Sheriff’s Office.

Most who spoke to the The Inquirer were reluctant to publicly criticize the sheriff, worried that might further delay getting the deeds or make it more difficult for them to purchase properties in the future.

“Sheer incompetence,” said one such buyer who on Friday was still waiting for a deed from an auction she’d won last year.

The deed delays have led to renewed calls for reform in the Sheriff’s Office.

State Rep. Jared Solomon (D., Philadelphia) this month said it’s time for overhaul of the office, accusing Bilal, a fellow Democrat, of “administrative malpractice.”

Andrew McGinley, vice president of external affairs at the Committee of Seventy good-government group, said: “[Time] after time, it’s proven that it can’t even do the most basic functions of the office.” The committee has long called for eliminating the Sheriff’s Office as an independently elected office.

The delays may have also been a violation of Pennsylvania’s Rules of Civil Procedure, which require sheriffs to file deeds with the courts, then “forthwith deliver the deed to the appropriate officers for recording.”

Docket entries show that while the Sheriff’s Office was submitting deeds to the court prothonotary, it apparently failed to send copies to the city Records Department to finalize these sales until weeks or months later. That department processes deeds for every real estate sale in order to create a formal, public record of a property changing hands.

For example, Dave Brown, of Norristown, paid $143,000 for an Oxford Circle rowhouse he won at auction last November. Court entries list a “sheriff’s deed acknowledgment” on March 11, indicating the sheriff transmitted a deed of sale to the prothonotary and closing the underlying foreclosure case.

But in Brown’s case, the Sheriff’s Office appears not to have submitted a deed to the Records Department until months later. According to Leonard, the records commissioner, the Sheriff’s Office sent Leonard’s office a copy on June 4 at 10:53 a.m. His staff recorded that document less than an hour later.

Brown, 54, who works for a local utility company, described his experience as “a debacle.”

Asked Thursday about the lag between deed acknowledgment docket entries and the deed recording times, Bilal’s spokesperson said lawyers in the office “do not know what that term means,” referring to the docket entries.

She did not respond to questions about why deeds were submitted to the courts but not the city Records Department, and declined to elaborate on the staffing issue that she said caused the delays. But she said that a new software system, which went online in June, was expected to “alleviate and reduce any further deed delays.”

The Sheriff’s Office will have to tackle these delays at the same time as it handles more auctions. The office this month resumed selling tax-delinquent properties for the first time since April 2021.

Those sales had been on hold since April 2021 after Bilal awarded a no-bid, six-year contract to Bid4Assets without the involvement of the city’s Law Department. That led to a backlog of more than 1,000 tax-delinquent properties and has left the city and school district with an estimated $35 million in uncollected revenues.

Joseph Vignola, who served as undersheriff under Bilal’s predecessor, Jewell Williams, said electronic deed recording was typically a straightforward process.

He said he was confused as to how lengthy delays could occur.

“We’d send it over to the prothonotary with my signature, it would come back, and we’d send it over to the recorder of deeds,” Vignola said. “We never had a problem. I don’t know what their new system does.”