Tax Delinquent Sale conundrum in Richmond Va - need some advice!

[Keith Polarek]

I picked up the winning bid at a tax sale a few weeks back. Close to 50 properties were sold that day. It will be a fix/flip. The house has good bones on a very good block. I should gross close to 100k when it's sold.  

My hard money lender gave me an approved/written offer and we're ready to move forward....accept that the city needs certified funds on June 18th and settlement is not finalized until the Circuit Court certifies the transfers title and records the deed on July 30th (5 weeks later). This puts my lender at risk of letting go of funds 5 weeks before they can secure the deed so it's currently a "no go" unless we can find a way to mitigate their risk.     

I assumed (I know, I know..) the city selling the property would have an escrow process so my lender could place funds until the deed was recorded. That is not the case. No extensions, no breaking this process (I offered to have my own real estate attorney close separately but to no avail). The contract verbiage isn't written to assign, and they'd rather just recoup the deposit and have the auctioneer sell it again on the next go around.  

At this point I think I have 2 options...

Option A - Force it to work by tactically mitigating 2 risks to my lender. 

1. Get a written commitment from the city tax commissioner to refund the lender's funds should the sale not go through. He's willing to say this is 99.9% a formality and expects no issues (title is clear on this one).

2. Find a way to secure title insurance (for the lender and for me) on the special warranty deed that I won't take ownership of for another 5 weeks. I'm not even sure that's legally feasible... or is it? 

Option B - Come up with the cash to settle the deal myself -- and then have the Hard Money Lender refinance me in 5 weeks once they can secure the loan against the deed. They're good with this approach so I'd have to come up with 106k and I'm only in the position to bring about 50k to the table as I have a few other deals in the works. (note -- I can't get a bridge loan since it's usually a consumer product and I've  just started doing this full time (4 months ago) and have no established source of income yet. I'd have to borrow or partner with friends who can get me some cash for 6 weeks. It's doable, but not ideal.  

Option C-  Do nothing and lose my deposit of 26k. -- not interested in pursuing this one. 

Are there other options I'm not considering?  Appreciate any advice you have to share on this!!