Pike County runs its sheriff’s sales through RealForeclose, an online platform operated by Realauction.com LLC, a privately held Florida company. The county switched to the platform in September 2025. Sheriff Brian Vennie told commissioners the contract had been “discussed in the Commissioners’ meeting and put on the agenda, publicly discussed.”
The Pocono Review reviewed every available commissioners’ meeting and conference packet from August through October 2025. The Real Auctions contract does not appear on any of them. Not as a motion, not as new or old business, not as a line item. The September 17 commissioners’ meeting — held the same day as the first RealForeclose sale — contains no reference to the vendor, the platform, or the transition.
Under Pennsylvania’s County Code (16 Pa.C.S. § 15101), commissioners are “the sole contractors for the county.” Contracts above statutory thresholds require written price quotations from at least three vendors. Larger contracts require formal advertised bidding. The Real Auctions contract appears to have bypassed all of it.
How This Came to Light
In August 2025, Pike County resident Jesse Tashlik stood up at a commissioners’ meeting and asked questions nobody at the table could fully answer.
Tashlik, a longtime participant in Pike County sheriff’s sales, told commissioners on August 6 that he’d spent months trying to get basic information about the county’s previous auction vendor, Bid4Assets. He’d spoken to the sheriff, sent multiple emails and letters to the sheriff’s office, the county solicitor, and the commissioners. “To date, I have not received a single response,” he said, per the official minutes. A Right-to-Know request filed July 4 seeking the contract and related documents remained unfulfilled more than a month later. Chief Clerk Krista Gromalski and Sheriff Vennie disagreed on whether the statutory deadline had passed.
Tashlik’s questions went beyond records. He wanted to know who authorized the Bid4Assets contract, and why a private company had been collecting a 1.5% buyer premium on every foreclosed property sold — money he argued was being taken from the county’s statutory poundage.
The Vendor Nobody Voted On
Bid4Assets is a Silver Spring, Maryland subsidiary of Liquidity Services Inc. (NASDAQ: LQDT, $477 million in annual revenue). Sheriff Kerry Welsh selected the company in August 2024 to run Pike County’s first online sheriff’s sales. The announcement came August 13. Welsh retired August 30. No RFP was issued. No motion authorizing the contract appears on any commissioners’ agenda.
For roughly a year, Bid4Assets collected a 1.5% buyer premium on every sale plus a $35-per-parcel processing fee, on top of the statutory 2% county poundage set by the Sheriff Fee Act. On a $165,000 sale, that’s $2,475 to a NASDAQ-traded company in Maryland.
County Solicitor Thomas Farley called the arrangement a “professional service” and said “when the Sheriff deems it appropriate, he can tell you” — treating vendor selection as the sheriff’s prerogative despite the County Code designating commissioners as sole contractors. Tashlik said a court hearing the day before revealed the 1.5% premium was coming from the sheriff’s poundage. Farley and Vennie disputed this, saying Bid4Assets waived the fee in his case. But the terms on every Bid4Assets listing for Pike County showed buyers paying the 2% poundage and a separate 1.5% premium.
The Defense
The county’s strongest card: $414,312 returned to foreclosed homeowners in seven months of online sales, versus $83,710 the prior year under in-person auctions. Commissioner Matthew Osterberg: “If we have collected $414K for residents, who in this room thinks we shouldn’t be doing that?”
Online auctions bring more bidders and higher prices. Farley acknowledged what the old market looked like: “I also did Sheriff sales. In all those Sheriff sales, it was you and maybe a couple of other individuals.” Commissioner Christa Caceres went after Tashlik’s motives, asking whether he’d purchased properties through Bid4Assets in Monroe County. “If you are participating in auctions in Monroe County with the same company, why are you here screaming at us?” Tashlik denied it.
The framing: Tashlik was a repeat buyer upset about competition, not a citizen with procedural questions. But $414K is an argument for online auctions, not for Bid4Assets. Real Auctions charges banks a flat $250 per sale with no buyer premium. If the county could get the same results without the 1.5% skim, the Bid4Assets year was a cost nobody examined until Tashlik forced the issue.
Same Process, Different Vendor
The buyer premium is gone. Pike County’s website promotes RealForeclose’s “transparent, secure, and fully compliant sale process.” But the process that selected Real Auctions looks identical to the process that selected Bid4Assets: no RFP, no competitive bids, no commissioners’ vote on the public record. Bid4Assets was still listing Pike County properties as late as January 2026, with the 1.5% premium in the terms, months after the announced September cutover.
This is the same contracting pattern that drew legal challenges in Philadelphia, where Sheriff Rochelle Bilal entered a six-year Bid4Assets contract without an RFP in 2021 and City Councilmember Helen Gym called it a charter violation. Pike County didn’t have Philadelphia’s COVID emergency order to cite. Welsh picked a vendor seventeen days before he retired. Vennie inherited the arrangement and swapped it for another one the same way.
The Sheriff Fee Act prescribes the fees a sheriff can collect: 2% poundage on the first $250,000, 0.5% above that, plus recovery of “costs, charges and expenses” like printing, publication, and mileage. A private vendor’s buyer premium appears nowhere in the statute.
The question for Pike County isn’t whether online auctions are better than the old courthouse-steps model. The question is whether a sheriff can hand a government function to a private company, twice, without a commissioners’ vote, without competitive bidding, and without producing the contract when a resident asks for it — and whether pointing to higher sale prices is an answer to any of that.
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