Palm Beach County Short Sales- Is Pressure Mounting For Homeowners Who Don't Pay Their Mortgage?

Jon- Oh Jon- Contrare! Here in our market, 9 out of 10 homeowners do have an attorney for defense against the foreclosure. The sad part is many of the attorneys are skipping town with the retainers, etc. I have a post about what just happened to one of our clients! Horrible! 

For a fee of $1700 you can live in your home for anywhere from one year to three years without making a mortgage payment. With most people around here, their mortgage payments average $2800 to $5600 a month. So $1700 is easy. 

Bill- When the bank does a deed in lieu while we are in a listing agreement, the bank tells the homeowner they have to cancel their listing with us before they can do one. We have only had one client do a deed in lieu in the 15+ years we have been doing short sales. 

Julia- perfect words. You are right. For some reason the homeowners assume some sort of fiduciary from the banks, this is not the case. You are so right. 

Lenn- Tell me about it! We see their despicable tactics. Sometimes my warnings just fall on deaf ears. 

Mike- Oh, we get a lot of listings after the homeowner has tried loan mod and told NOT to make any payments by their lender only to find themselves denied on the loan mod and in foreclosure even though they wanted to make payments during the process! 

Bill- Thanks! You are correct. 

Marie- We are a judicial state so it is much different than CA. Here once the lender files their lis pendens and the summons and complaint is served on the homeowners, then the homeowner has 20 calendar days to respond. We urge them all to respond because if you respond, you are exercising your judicial rights to your day in court. If they hire an attorney to do this for them, their attorney will file an answer and a counter complaint and will require evidences, interrogatories, producing the original note, etc. This will create a bottleneck in the opposing counsel's factory operations ( the foreclosure attorney for the lenders run these foreclosure mills here) so that usually will put off a date to be seen by the judge by months and even years. The reason is that they will handle all the cases that go uncontested first. If you get to a date and in front of a judge, our goal is to have an offer in your hand to show the judge that you do have an offer and need more time because the banks are so slow. Judges don't like banks right now and most often will look for any reason to legally allow the homeowner more time. 

There are cases here in FL where the homeowners were actually awarded their homes free and clear or seriously discount to punish the banks for violations of law. This is why the banksters lobbyists are working so hard here to get rid of our rights to a judicial process. Katerina 

Ruthmarie: I should write some posts about some of the great first hand experiences we have had with attorneys that rip their clients off. But I don't want to offend the good ones. We have attorneys who hire us to do their own personal short sales on their homes. And we do have 2 really good ones here.