Above a nondescript dry cleaners in Center City sits a mysterious little office. The rare visitor has to walk through an unrelated tax preparation business to reach its three tiny rooms, each overflowing with stacks of paperwork. No signs mark the office, let alone one that would indicate that it’s home to Philadelphia’s biggest sheriff sale buyer, and, therefore, one of the city’s biggest landholders.

In just the past three years, Adam Ehrlich has used this shoebox to pick up least 492 tax-delinquent properties at sheriff sale – semi-weekly, government-run auctions of land in arrears for tax or mortgage payments.

A PlanPhilly analysis of city deed records estimates that the one-time professional poker player-turned-real estate mogul has spent about $2 million to acquire the equivalent of roughly 11 square blocks’ worth of land. The true extent of Ehrlich’s empire is unknown as he has used a constellation of 49 separate holding companies linked to his downtown offices – a legal shield against possible lawsuits.

“It is my understanding that I am the biggest purchaser” of sheriff sale properties, he said in a July phone interview, although he declined to discuss specific numbers.

Ehrlich is a new kind of buyer, one emblematic of the city’s booming real estate market. Once sleepy sheriff’s auctions have become crowded with bidders hoping to cash in on skyrocketing real estate prices. The city is also sending more tax-delinquent land to auction than ever – although not all made it to sale, tax lien foreclosure petitions jumped from 7,600 in 2013 to 10,680 last year.

It’s a trend that has drawn the ire of political figures like City Council President Darrell Clarke, who say many buyers are mere speculators hoping to catch the next gentrification-fueled boom. Legal advocates who represent indigent homeowners say the increased pace of sales sometimes threatens homeowners with eviction over minor tax bills.

Ehrlich admits his purchases are nearly all are in the city’s most poverty-stricken neighborhoods, although he strongly emphasized that he has never bought an occupied property – not worth the trouble, he says. He argues that sheriff sale buyers provide a valuable service: putting delinquent properties back onto city tax rolls.

“These tax-delinquent properties would go by auctions with no one bidding on them, [with] no money collected by the city. The city even sold a bunch of their old liens to a bank once,” Ehrlich said.

But newcomers to real estate, like Ehrlich, may also have little expertise in property management, struggling to keep up with maintenance as their holdings rapidly grow. In July, the Department of Licenses & Inspections said it was tracking open code violations on 305 properties controlled by Ehrlich for issues ranging from missing permits to serious structural safety hazards. The city has sent some of Ehrlich’s holding companies to court over outstanding code violations and tax liens.

BET THE HOUSE

In a phone call following a PlanPhilly reporter’s visit to his office, the 42-year-old Ehrlich declined to discuss exactly how he came into the wholesaling business. He said only that “a friend” told him he had “the right skills,” but declined to say what skills those were.

Ehrlich’s LinkedIn profile lists a background in options trading, although he appears to have restyled himself as a professional gambler and women’s jewelry wholesaler sometime in the late 2000s. Going by the self-anointed nickname “Good Bet” in tournaments (“Because I’m a damn Good Bet”), he won a spot on NBC’s “Face the Ace” in 2009.

With a shock of curly hair and a shiny crimson button-up, Ehrlich would become known to viewers for his talkative-but-aloof nature in the televised quest for a million-dollar poker prize. He would ultimately lose everything on a $200,000 match-up, standing beside host Steve Schirripa, an actor best known for playing Bobby Baccalieri on The Sopranos.

In 2012, Ehrlich resurfaced as a predictive analyst betting in the world of political odds markets, and was quoted in a Bloomberg Businessweek article gaming out the results of that year’s Republican primary in Iowa. Rick Santorum’s narrow win bucked analysts that had leaned heavily towards candidate Mitt Romney.

Today, Ehrlich seems to be hedging his bets, so to speak.

He describes himself as a “property wholesaler,” a niche business term often used in areas with lots of distressed real estate. Wholesalers turn a profit, in part, by acting as a middleman, extracting a premium from developers leery of buying directly from government auctions that are too risky for guarantees like title insurance.