Technical Glitch Delays Sheriff’s First Online Foreclosure Auction

Vacant home slated for redevelopment by Gorman & Co. that the city previously owned through property tax foreclosure. Located at 2628 N. 21st. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

A technical glitch is pushing back the date of the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office‘s (MCSO) first online foreclosure auction.

The MCSO was all set to hold its first digital auction of property tax-foreclosed real estate on Aug. 3. The new online auction would solve a long-running problem with rigged bids, collusion and intimidation during sheriff’s auctions. But “unforeseen technical complications” will delay the auction to Aug. 10, when the issues should be resolved.

It has taken nearly a decade for the county to set up online foreclosure auctions. In 2018, the Milwaukee County Board pushed the MCSO and then-County Executive Chris Abele to set up an online auction system. The push followed changes in state law that allowed online auctions and also allowed the sheriff to reject potential bidders if they were known problem landlords with back taxes or excessive building code violations. Until now, the auctions have taken place in person in the basement of the Safety Building, 821 W State St.

In the past year, the MCSO has worked with Bid4Assets, a digital real estate auction company, to host the sales for the sheriff’s office. It will “modernize” the process and provide “efficiency” for the government program and public bidders, according to the MCSO. It will also solve another problem.

In 2023, then-county Corporation Counsel Margaret Daun explained that the foreclosure auction process has “extensive problems with both intimidation, collusion and other, what I would call negative behaviors, related to foreclosure sales… It is generally considered when you look at foreclosure sales, that moving them online does increase the fairness of the process and reduces the ability for effectively — and I’m going to be pretty blunt here, use some layperson language — bad actor landlords to overwhelm the process and dominate it.”

Then-supervisor Eddie Cullen, now the communications manager in the Office of the County Clerk, authored the 2018 resolution pushing for an online system. The in-person auctions could be “scary” and were “very much an insider’s club of landlords who say, ‘Yeah, don’t bid on this one. I’ve got this one. We’ll let you get the next one,'” he told Urban Milwaukee in 2023.

The new online program was set up using $277,980 in federal American Rescue Plan Act funds. The funding was allocated in 2023 as part of a $7 million countywide digital transformation project.