Philadelphia County Sheriff's Sales · September – December 2026

The August sale is in. It says these houses cost six times the opening bid.

1,213 listings across five sale dates, joined to the city's parcel, crime, permit, licence, violation, tax-lien and deed records — including 5,593 sheriff's deeds since 2021 that show what properties in each neighbourhood actually sell for.

1,213 listings · 5 dates 5,593 sheriff's deeds since 2021 187,770 L&I violations (24 mo) 54,261 tax-delinquent parcels 153,243 crime incidents 141,387 permits Radius 400 m

What actually happened on 4 August

The August sale has closed, so its outcomes are known. They are the single best guide to what the four remaining sales will do — and they contradict the obvious read of an opening bid.

6.0×

Median winning bid ÷ opening bid

Twenty-one properties were won by third-party bidders in August. The median one sold for six times its opening bid, and the range ran from 1.05× to 14.78×. A $20,000 opening bid is realistically a $120,000 purchase.

Worse for the buyer: of 414 listed, only 79 reached the block at all — the rest were postponed or stayed — and the bank bought back 58 of those. Your odds of taking a given listed property home were about 5%.

Outcome of all 414 August listings

The 21 properties actually won

Opening bid → winning bid. Sorted by price.

Address	Open	Won	×

What each area historically clears at

Median third-party sheriff's-deed price within 400 m of the candidates in each ZIP, from deeds recorded since 2021. This is the number to underwrite against — not the opening bid. The third-party rate is the share of nearby sheriff's deeds that went to a buyer rather than an institution; where it is low, the bank takes the house back.

Median score by ZIP

Hover for detail.

Historical clearing price vs city value

ZIP	n	Clears at	City value	Ratio	3rd-party	Violent

The ranked shortlist

411 residential candidates under $50,000 across the four remaining sales, scored for a buy-and-hold rental. All-in is the expected clearing price plus any delinquent city tax on that parcel. Value is the city's market value divided by all-in — above 2× is where the thesis works.

Sale Filter

#												Sub-scores

How the score is built

Every city record within 400 m of each parcel centroid is counted, converted to a percentile within the 411-property pool, and weighted for a rental hold.

Weights

Signals

Safety — violent incidents at 70%, property crime at 30%, trailing twelve months.
Value — city market value over all-in cost, where all-in uses the neighbourhood's historical clearing price, floored at 1.5× the opening bid.
Winnability — debt-to-value plus the local third-party deed rate. Both must hold: a low debt means the bank stops bidding, a high third-party rate means buyers actually win there.
Distress — L&I violations, tax-delinquent parcels, unsafe designations and vacant lots nearby, inverted.
Rental depth — active city rental licences nearby.
Momentum — new-construction permits at 60%, all permits at 40%.

Still not priced in

Rent. No achievable-rent figure exists in open data; licence density stands in for market depth. Yield is unmodelled.
Condition. No interior access on any of these.
Title. Mortgage and municipal liens beyond the delinquent-tax file, and occupancy.
Postponement. In August, 70% of listings were postponed or stayed before sale day.
Assessment lag. City market value is an assessment, not an appraisal.