Sheriff's sales to resume this July in Philly

PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Philadelphia Sheriff Rochelle Bilal says her office will resume auctioning tax-delinquent properties in July.

Bilal asked City Council for $10 million more than the Parker administration budgeted. She says her office is woefully understaffed and more is needed to make salaries competitive and hire more deputies.

Despite that, she told council Wednesday she is ready to resume tax lien sales after a four-year suspension .

Bilal didn’t give details of the agreement but said all that remains before restarting these sales is providing the mandated two-month notice to property owners that will be going on the block.

Bilal took some heat for the suspended sales but said she’s not the one who suspended them. That happened during the pandemic to keep people in their homes. Foreclosure sales did resume, and Bilal said she instituted policies like the creation of constituent service representatives to help homeowners avoid the process.

She says their job is to get all the local, state and federal information on how people can save their homes.

“When we first came into office and we put this into place, there were 320 sales going on that day,” Bilal said. “When we started sending out information to families that were dealing with this issue, sales went down to 17.”

She says the same effort will go into tax lien sales, though many of those involve vacant property and out-of-town owners.

Councilmember Rue Landau, a former housing attorney, asked about the timing of the July restart.

Bilal’s aide Tariq El-Shabazz said it would allow time for publishing legal notices.

“Even though we’re at the threshold of the door (of) getting it started, we have to advertise giving people sufficient notice. If we didn’t give people sufficient notice, we’d have a legal problem on our hand.”