By Paul Owers, Sun Sentinel
3:09 AM EST, January 21, 2010
Buying a foreclosed home at the courthouse becomes obsolete Thursday as Palm Beach County launches a new era with online auctions.
Broward County plans to begin online foreclosure sales by March. Miami-Dade County started using them earlier this month.
The move is meant to save time and money as counties deal with budget cuts and a mountain of mortgage defaults. Palm Beach County says it has more than 53,000 pending foreclosure cases.
"The efficiencies we realize, I think, will be enormous," said Mark Broderick, director of civil court services for Palm Beach County Clerk & Comptroller Sharon Bock.
As allowed under Florida law, the county will charge a new $60 fee to each winning bidder to cover the cost of automating the auctions.
Bock's staff ran its last live auction Tuesday. It had conducted two or three in-person sales a week, selling 80 to 150 properties at each one.
The online auctions will increase sales and open the bidding to a deeper pool of potential buyers who no longer have to drive to the courthouse, proponents say.
"The hope is that more of these properties will be bought by investors as opposed to going back to the banks," said Ian Yorty, director of Florida business development for Grant Street Group, a Pittsburgh-based company that will operate the online auctions for Palm Beach County.
Comments