A post at Axis Philly describes how 8 lots in Kensington failed to sell at a recent sheriff’s sale. Absolutely no one bid on them.
The folks at PhilaDelinquency have a handy how-to guide for getting a property in your neighborhood put onto the sheriff’s sale list.
There’s also this very hands-on overview from Naked Philly.
Of course, both of these are focused on how to get a nuisance property listed for sheriff’s sale. They don’t deal with how you can buy a property, clean it up, and make it not a nuisance.
It seems to me the Sheriff’s Office ought to let people sign up for e-mail or text message alerts that tell them when a property in their neighborhood is up for sale.
It stands to reason that some of the people interested in buying and fixing up vacant land or abandoned houses already live in those neighborhoods.
Maybe they’re bothered by eyesore properties, or motivated by the hope that their own property values will increase if they clean up a dump. Whatever motivates them, we should capitalize on their energy — not squash it in a sea of confusing, opaque municipal processes.
It shouldn’t be too hard to set up the alerts. You can already get a Google News alert for a specific phrase and a Ready.gov alert for your municipality or county. This is a solvable problem.
Unfortunately, the technology part is the easy part.
As other reporting by Axis Philly reveals, the Sheriff’s Office apparently doesn’t have a functioning accounting system (?!?!) and the city refuses to disclose how it sets the price of properties for sale.
So there are definitely municipal culture factors at work that go far beyond a simple technical fix.
BetterPHL 
Recent Comments