By TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA, Miami Herald

In a move that could speed the sale of massive numbers of distressed properties on the market, Miami-Dade County officially launched online bidding for foreclosures Monday, bringing together bidders from across the globe and launching hopes of an accelerated return to normalcy in the real estate industry.

The new system, managed by Plantation-based RealAuction.com, will completely replace the traditional courthouse procedure, and is expected to save the county $750,000 annually while cutting out a lot of the paperwork that has weighed down the process, said Miami-Dade Clerk of Courts Harvey Ruvin. The move comes at a time of high anxiety at the foreclosure division of Miami-Dade Clerk of Courts office, as it tries to balance a ballooning backlog of foreclosure cases and a slashed budget.

“This couldn’t be happening at a better time for us,” Ruvin said. “We are in an enormous avalanche of foreclosures. We have over 110,000 open foreclosure files, with an additional 7,000 coming in each month.”

Ruvin says the new online system — capable of handling four times as many auctions per week as the courthouse — will help reduce the troublesome backlog.

Foreclosure-ravaged Florida is the first state to adopt an online auction system for distressed properties, using the software in nine counties, with three more to be added by March. Broward County is expected to launch an online auction system before March. The state has sold more than 20,000 homes via Internet auction since 2008, when the Legislature changed the law to allow for online public sales, said Lloyd McClelland, CEO of RealAuction.com.

Forty-six homes were auctioned off on Monday — including a Miami Beach studio and a South Dade 3-bedroom single-family home at $150,000 and $313,000, respectively. A New York investor was the only bidder to close a deal on Monday, purchasing a Miami Beach condo for an undisclosed sum.

In the months ahead, the county’s online auction could sell as many as 2,000 properties per week, compared to the 450 homes the courthouse procedures regularly logged, allowing the county to reduce its caseload. Since the program needs minimal human maintenance, most of the 23 employees dedicated to running the traditional auction process will be redeployed to attend to other areas of the foreclosure process, Ruvin said. (Read more)