This is what I came to see, the rough and tumble world of a sheriff's foreclosure auction. Funny, the people sitting in the lobby around me didn't look like the old west, but then again, looks can be deceiving.
The clerk (and not the sheriff), in her monotone voice, began reading off case numbers, quite quickly I might add, telling us which ones were cancelled (I don't know why but an educated guess is the homeowner reached some sort of settlement with the bank) or were continued to a future date.
After this, the auction began. The clerk mentioned we would be having a lot of plaintiff sales today. The party bringing the foreclosure action is the plaintiff (almost always it is the bank who has the mortgage on the property). In a plaintiff sale, the bank makes the opening bid which is generally the amount of the mortgage, and then others begin to bid over this amount. In my previous blog on this subject, I mention the bidding instructions. If there are no other bids, the property is then sold to the plaintiff for the opening bid. This is also known as a judgment settlement. This happened on about 25 properties - no one else bid except the plaintiff.
Only one property was there a bid from the people in the lobby. The bidder was known to the clerk because she called him by name. He was the only person who bid on this property and was declared the highest bidder by the clerk, at $1 over the opening bid of $185,251.73. In my next and last blog on this topic, I will provide an analysis of the transaction as best I can from the public records as well as some of the pitfalls of purchasing homes at a sheriff's foreclosure auction.
The process was quick and streamlined. In about 30 minutes, approximately 25 properties were auctioned off. The lives of 25 people affected for years to come with the sting of foreclosure in their credit history file. It was not action packed like the charity auctions I have attended but rather a very subdued atmosphere. Sad really when you think about the lives affected.
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