The Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office said there were delays in the registration of notarial deeds and they will be fixed.

For the past month, Philadelphia Sheriff Rochelle Bilal has insisted nothing bad was happening.

Her staff has repeatedly denied that the office has problems processing deeds after foreclosure auctions — despite calls and visits from frustrated homebuyers and an Inquirer review of city records showing chronic delays.

“You claim there was a widespread delay, but that is not true,” a spokesman for Bilal wrote in an email Tuesday afternoon.

The Inquirer reports that some sheriff’s auction winners are waiting seven months or more to receive deeds, a process that used to take six to eight weeks.

In response to reporters’ questions about how the slowdown might affect the recent resumption of delinquent tax sales, Bilal’s legal team suggested that the delays may be due to the city Records Department failing to record the deeds after they were sent by the Sheriff’s Office.

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

After reviewing the documentation, Bilal’s employees changed their minds and admitted that they had been wrong in blaming unspecified personnel issues.

They currently plan to audit every notarial deed filed this year.

“Your persistent questions prompted us to dig deeper into this matter and discover that the documents you provided to our office were delayed due to a staffing error,” Bilal spokeswoman Teresa Lundy wrote in an email Wednesday. “We are evaluating and updating our current policies and procedures and will provide corrective action and training.”

” READ MORE: They bought properties at sheriff’s sales in Philadelphia but never got the deed

Some buyers are still waiting for title deeds for properties that were put up for auction last September. The problem seems to be widespread.

Bid4Assets, the online auction company used by the Sheriff’s Office to sell properties, tells buyers that it can take up to 90 days to record deeds. But an Inquirer analysis of more than 130 sheriff’s deeds recorded between October 2023 and March 2024 found that the average is more than 200 days.

In February and March, the office submitted only 29 notarial deeds for registration, almost all of which concerned auctions that took place between 200 and 300 days before the date of submission.

Buyers, attorneys and real estate agents facing delays say they have received no clear explanation from the sheriff’s office.

Most people who spoke to The Inquirer were reluctant to publicly criticize the sheriff, fearing it could further delay obtaining property deeds or make it harder for them to purchase property in the future.

“Complete incompetence,” said one buyer, who was still waiting on Friday for the deed from an auction she won last year.

Delays in the issuance of deeds have led to renewed calls for reform of the sheriff’s office.

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

Andrew McGinley, vice president for external affairs at the good governance group of the Committee of Seventy, said:[Time] over time, he proved incapable of performing even the most basic functions of the office.” The commission has long called for the elimination of the Sheriff’s Office as an independently elected office.

Delays could also constitute a breach Pennsylvania Rules of Civil Procedurewhich require sheriffs to file documents with the courts and then “promptly forward the documents to the appropriate officials for registration.”

Records show that while the Sheriff’s Office filed deeds with the court’s protonotary, it apparently did not send copies to the city’s Department of Records to finalize those transactions until weeks or months later. That department processes deeds for every property sale to create a formal, public record of the property’s change of ownership.

For example, Dave Brown of Norristown paid $143,000 for an Oxford Circle townhouse he won at auction last November. Court records list a “sheriff’s deed acknowledgment” dated March 11, showing that the sheriff transferred the deed of sale to the prothonotary and closed the underlying foreclosure case.

But in Brown’s case, the Sheriff’s Office apparently didn’t send the deed to the Records Department until months later. According to Leonard, the records commissioner, the Sheriff’s Office sent a copy to Leonard’s office at 10:53 a.m. on June 4. His employees logged the deed less than an hour later.

Brown, 54, an employee at a local utility company, described his experience as a “disaster.”

Asked Thursday about the delay between the entries in the register of confirmations of deeds and the time of registration of the deed, Bilal’s spokesman said that lawyers in the office “do not know what that time means,” referring to the entries in the register.

She did not respond to questions about why the deeds were filed with the courts rather than the city’s deeds department, and declined to elaborate on the staffing issues she said caused the delays. But she said the new software system, which went live in June, is intended to “mitigate and mitigate any further deed delays.”

The sheriff’s office will have to deal with those delays at the same time it handles more auctions. This month, the office resumed selling delinquent properties for the first time since April 2021.

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

Joseph Vignola, who served as a deputy sheriff under Bilal’s predecessor, Jewell Williams, said electronic recording of deeds is typically a straightforward process.

He added that he was unsure how long the delays might be.

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