Philadelphia Unemployment Project

Sheriff Green’s Fees- The Money Pit for Homeowners in Foreclosure

Sheriff Green charges a $1,700 deposit to each homeowner that he lists for Sheriff’s Sale.
This fee must be paid by the homeowner before they can work out a repayment arrangement with the mortgage company.

Homeowners and advocates have been pressing Sheriff Green to reduce these fees for years to little avail. He reduced the fee to $1,200 in 2004 from $2,000 and then raised it back to $1,700 in 2005.

In March of 2006 the Board of Judges of the Court of Common Pleas adopted a new rule to reduce the amount of advertising to list a property for sale, in order to cut the costs of the Sheriff’s deposit.

The Sheriff also committed to do competitive bidding among local papers to get reduce prices for the advertising. State law requires a property to be advertised three times in a paper of “general circulation” and the county legal paper, in Philadelphia, the Legal Intelligencer.

The bid schedule called for bidding to be closed in November of 2006 and the new contract to commence on or about February 1, 2007.

In 2006 9,150 properties were exposed for Sheriff’s Sale and the $1,700 fee was collected. This came to $12,810,000 in fees.

Reach Communications, a firm that was owned by the Sheriff’s former campaign treasurer places the ads and collects a 15% fee for all the ads placed. We estimate that Reach made over $1 million, just placing Sheriff Sale ads in 2006.

Despite the reduced ad requirements and the plan to bid out the ads there has been NO REDUCTION IN THE SHERIFF'S DEPOSIT.

This deposit is paid by the mortgage company on behalf of the homeowner, who must pay it before the mortgage company will stay the sale. If the house is sold at Sheriff’s Sale the fee comes out of the homeowner’s equity.

The Philadelphia Unemployment Project believes that advertising could be done for around $500 and when coupled with other required fees the Sheriff could reduce his deposit requirement to $800 from the current $1,700.

With election day coming, the Sheriff has shown a desire to keep the ads as high as possible. This is a business where millions of dollars change hands. The money comes from homeowners losing their homes. If he does not make a commitment to substantially reduce these fees before the election, homeowners stand to be bilked of millions more by Sheriff Green.