A foreclosure auction is the public sale of a property to satisfy a debt the owner stopped paying. There are two kinds. A trustee sale is run by a private trustee under the deed of trust, with no court involved, and is how most Washington foreclosures end. A sheriff sale is run by the county sheriff after a court judgment, and is how judicial foreclosures and lien foreclosures end. Both are cash sales, both sell the property as-is with no inspection, and both wipe out junior liens while leaving senior ones in place. The differences that matter to a buyer are who runs the sale, whether the former owner can buy it back afterward, and what you inherit.
I do not buy at auction. I buy from the owner in the months before the sale, when there is still a deal to make. But you cannot work the pre-foreclosure window without understanding where it ends, and the auction record is one of the more useful public datasets on who is buying distressed houses and at what discount. This page covers both. It is part of our guide to finding distressed properties, which covers the full pipeline of signals that lead up to a sale like this.
Trustee sale vs sheriff sale vs tax sale
Three different auctions get called "foreclosure auction." They run under different statutes and produce different outcomes.
| Trustee sale | Sheriff sale | Tax foreclosure sale | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who is foreclosing | A lender under a deed of trust | A judgment creditor: a lender in a judicial foreclosure, an HOA, a lienholder | The county treasurer for unpaid property taxes |
| Court involved | No | Yes, a judgment first | Yes, a judgment first |
| Who runs it | The trustee named in the deed of trust | The county sheriff | The county treasurer |
| Where and when | A public place in the county, Fridays, under RCW 61.24 | Online in King County, after four weeks of notice | Annual or periodic county auction |
| Redemption after sale | None | 8 months to 1 year | None after the sale, but a long delinquency period before it |
| Deed you receive | Trustee's deed | Sheriff's certificate, then a sheriff's deed after redemption expires | Treasurer's deed |
| What it wipes out | Liens junior to the foreclosing deed of trust | Liens junior to the judgment lien | Nearly everything, including mortgages |
The redemption row is the one that catches people. Washington's trustee-sale statute, RCW 61.24.050, is blunt: "after a trustee's sale, no person shall have any right, by statute or otherwise, to redeem the property sold." The trustee's deed conveys everything the borrower had, and the sale is final on acceptance of the bid if the deed records within fifteen days. A sheriff sale is the opposite. Under RCW 6.23.020 the debtor can redeem within eight months on a post-1961 mortgage where the lender waived a deficiency, and within one year otherwise. You buy at a sheriff sale and then wait up to a year to find out whether you own anything.
The timeline before a trustee sale
Because Washington is a non-judicial state, the trustee sale has a statutory clock, and every date on it is public once the notice records. RCW 61.24.040 sets it:
- Default. The borrower misses payments. Nothing is recorded yet.
- Notice of default. Served on the borrower, not recorded. The public cannot see it. For owner-occupied homes a pre-foreclosure letter under RCW 61.24.031 comes first, which adds 30 days.
- Notice of trustee's sale. Recorded with the county auditor "at least 90 days before the sale, or if a letter under RCW 61.24.031 is required, at least 120 days before the sale," and never "less than 190 days from the date of default." This is the first document the public sees, and it is what how to find pre-foreclosures is built around.
- Publication. Once between the 35th and 28th day before the sale, once between the 14th and 7th.
- Cure deadline. The borrower can reinstate by paying the arrears up to 11 days before the sale.
- Restraint deadline. A borrower who wants a court to stop the sale must give the trustee five days' notice of the hearing under RCW 61.24.130.
- The sale. Held on a Friday at a designated public place in the county, or the following Monday if Friday is a holiday.
Add it up and a Washington owner has at least 190 days from first default to auction, and at least 90 of those with a recorded notice anyone can read. That is the pre-foreclosure window. Most sales in the notice get postponed at least once, and a large share never happen because the owner cures, sells, or files bankruptcy. How to find out if a property is in foreclosure covers reading the recorder's index to tell a live sale from a cancelled one.
The timeline before a sheriff sale
A sheriff sale starts with a lawsuit and ends with a court order directing the sheriff to sell. The notice rules are in RCW 6.21.030: the sheriff posts notice "for a period of not less than four weeks prior to the date of sale" in two public places and publishes it weekly in a legal newspaper for the same period. King County moved its sales online; the Sheriff's property sales page points bidders to a registration site and warns that opening bids can change before sale time and that redemption runs "from eight months to one year."
Sheriff sales in Washington are mostly not mortgage foreclosures, since lenders use the faster trustee route. They are HOA lien foreclosures, judgment lien foreclosures, and the occasional judicial mortgage foreclosure where the lender wants a deficiency judgment. That makes the sheriff docket smaller and stranger than the trustee calendar.
How bidding and payment work
The mechanics are similar at both, and neither resembles buying a house.
- The lender opens with a credit bid. The foreclosing lender bids the amount it is owed without putting up cash. If nobody outbids it, the lender takes the property and it becomes real estate owned, an REO. On the Seattle record, 75 of the 177 trustee's deeds recorded since June 2024 show a $0 sale price, which is what a credit bid looks like on the assessor's roll.
- Everyone else pays cash. Certified funds, in full, at the sale or within a short deadline. King County's sheriff accepts cash, cashier's checks, ACH, and cards with a fee. No financing contingency exists.
- No inspection. You bid on a house you have seen from the sidewalk. The former owner or a tenant may still be inside, and after a trustee sale you handle that under the unlawful detainer statute, not the foreclosure statute.
- No title insurance at the sale. You do your own title search before you bid. How to do a title search is the process; the next section is why it matters.
- Postponements are routine. A sale can be continued from the courthouse steps to a later Friday, sometimes repeatedly. The bidders who show up every week are the ones who know which continuances are real.
What you inherit: the liens that survive
This is where auction buyers lose money. A foreclosure sale extinguishes liens that are junior to the one being foreclosed. Everything senior stays on the property, and you now own it subject to that debt.
| Lien | Survives a first-mortgage trustee sale? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Property taxes | Yes | Taxes are senior to everything |
| First mortgage (the one foreclosing) | Paid off by the sale | It is the debt being satisfied |
| Second mortgage, HELOC | No | Junior to the first |
| Judgment liens recorded after the deed of trust | No | Junior |
| Code enforcement or abatement liens | Usually yes | In Washington, assessed at the same rank as property taxes under RCW 35.80.030 |
| HOA assessments | Partly | Depends on the declaration's priority clause and the amount |
| IRS tax liens | Wiped, with a 120-day federal redemption right | 26 U.S.C. 7425(d) gives the IRS 120 days, or the local redemption period if longer |
The row I care about is the code enforcement one. A code enforcement lien in Washington is entered onto the tax roll at tax rank, so it rides through a mortgage foreclosure and lands on the auction buyer. Whether a code lien survives foreclosure is its own question with state-by-state answers, and I will write it up separately. For now: search the city's enforcement record before you bid, not just the recorder. How to find liens on a property covers both.
What the sale record shows
King County codes every recorded sale with an instrument type and a reason. Trustee's deeds and sheriff's deeds are their own instruments, and "foreclosure" is its own reason code, so the auction outcomes are countable. Seattle, June 2024 through September 2026:
| Count | |
|---|---|
| Foreclosure-coded sales (trustee's deed, sheriff's deed, or foreclosure reason) | 252 |
| Trustee's deeds | 177 |
| Sheriff's deeds | 5 |
| Trustee's deeds recorded at $0 (lender credit bid) | 75 |
| Trustee's deeds bought by an investor entity (LLC, corporation, fund) | 76 |
| Trustee's deeds bought by a lender or servicer | 22 |
And the price. On the 73 foreclosure-instrument sales with a recorded price and an assessed value to compare against, the median sale ran 0.83 times assessed value. The median arm's-length Seattle sale over the same period ran 1.08 times assessed. The auction discount, measured on the roll, is about a quarter off the ordinary sale, before repairs, before eviction, and before whatever survived.
One more join. Of the 230 Seattle addresses that went through a foreclosure-coded sale, 44 had a code violation case on file, 19%. The baseline for arm's-length sales is 5.7%. Where the violation predated the sale, the median first case opened 734 days before the deed recorded. Two years of public warning, from a city record, before the lender's notice ever hit the county.
Source: King County Assessor sales records for Seattle joined to the FlaggedLeads code violation database by normalized address; instrument and reason codes decoded from the county's own lookup table. Counts and co-occurrence only, not a probability that any violation leads to foreclosure.
The risks, honestly
| Risk | What it looks like | How auction buyers handle it |
|---|---|---|
| Senior liens you did not find | A tax or code lien that survived the sale | Full title search plus a city enforcement search before bidding |
| Condition | No inspection, possibly no utilities, possibly stripped | Bid as if the interior is a full rehab |
| Occupancy | Former owner or tenant still in place | Budget for cash-for-keys or an unlawful detainer action |
| Redemption | On a sheriff sale, the debtor buys it back inside a year | Do not improve the property until the period runs |
| Postponement or cancellation | Sale continued, cured, or stayed by bankruptcy | Check the trustee's calendar the morning of |
| Competition | The same dozen bidders every Friday | Accept that the discount is priced by professionals |
That last row is the real one. The Seattle trustee-deed buyers are 76 entities against 22 lenders and a small number of individuals, and several of the entity names repeat. This is a professional market with a public calendar, and the 0.83 median is what the professionals settle at.
The alternative: get there first
Every property on that auction calendar was in default for at least 190 days first, had a recorded notice for at least 90, and in 19% of cases had a code case on file two years before that. The owner could have sold at any point in that window, to anyone who called. Choose one metro and start a 14-day trial, with no card required. The auction is where the pre-foreclosure pipeline ends. The deal is upstream. Code violations vs pre-foreclosure leads compares the two research paths.
Frequently asked questions
How does a foreclosure auction work?
The foreclosing party, a trustee or the county sheriff, gives public notice for a set period, then sells the property at a public sale to the highest cash bidder. The lender opens with a credit bid for what it is owed. Other bidders pay in certified funds. The buyer receives a trustee's deed or sheriff's deed and takes the property as-is, subject to any liens senior to the one foreclosed.
What is a sheriff sale?
A sheriff sale is a public auction run by the county sheriff to enforce a court judgment, including a judicial foreclosure, an HOA lien foreclosure, or a judgment lien. In Washington the sheriff posts and publishes notice for at least four weeks before the sale. The debtor keeps a right to redeem the property for eight months to a year after the sale.
What is the difference between a trustee sale and a sheriff sale?
A trustee sale is a non-judicial foreclosure under a deed of trust, run by a private trustee with no court case, and the buyer's title is final with no redemption. A sheriff sale follows a court judgment, is run by the sheriff, and the former owner can redeem the property within eight months to a year. Most Washington mortgage foreclosures are trustee sales.
Can you inspect a house before a foreclosure auction?
Not the interior. The property is still owned and often occupied until the sale, and neither the trustee nor the sheriff has a right to let you in. Bidders look from the street, read the permit and code enforcement history, and price the interior as unknown.
What liens survive a foreclosure auction?
Liens senior to the one being foreclosed survive, and the buyer takes the property subject to them. Property taxes always survive. In Washington a code enforcement or abatement assessment is entered at the same rank as property taxes, so it usually survives a mortgage foreclosure. Junior mortgages and later judgment liens are wiped out. Federal tax liens are wiped but the IRS keeps a 120-day redemption right.
How much cheaper are foreclosure auction properties?
On the Seattle record, the median foreclosure-instrument sale with a recorded price was 0.83 times the assessed value, against 1.08 times for an ordinary arm's-length sale in the same period. That is roughly a quarter below the market, before repairs, occupancy costs, and any surviving liens.
Can the owner stop a trustee sale?
Yes, up to a point. The borrower can reinstate the loan by paying the arrears until 11 days before the sale. They can ask a court to restrain the sale, with five days' notice to the trustee. A bankruptcy filing stays the sale automatically. Or they can sell the house before the sale date, which is the option most investors are working toward.