How long till I get foreclosed on?
That’s a good question…
So, that really depends.
Have you been served a notice of default? You can go delinquent on your payments, but really the clock doesn’t start ticking, in a sense, until you get your notice of default and that is literally a notice from the bank that you are in default, and they’re going to begin the foreclosure process. Usually in the notice of default, they will put your name and the property address. They publish this out. If you go to Georgiapublicnotice.com, this is actually published publicly for people to see.
That’s also why you might all of a sudden get a bunch of phone calls from investors and realtors, trying to help you with the foreclosure, because that notice has been published out there to the public for everyone to see.
As soon as you get this notice of default, that’s when the clock starts ticking and that notice of default will tell you when your house is going to go up for auction. It will say they will “cry it to the public” at whatever your county courthouse is, on X date. It’s always the first Tuesday of every month when they do the foreclosure auctions in every single county. Most of the time, the foreclosure auctions are handled by third parties now like auction.com, or Hudson & Marshall, or Xome, or some of those other companies. They’re all done through third parties now, but they will call it “crying” at auction. They “put it on the courthouse steps.” They publish it out and say, “Hey, this property’s for sale.” The bidders will bid it up to the highest bidder and then the property will ultimately get sold to an investor and then they have to file for an eviction to get you out of the house and that’s basically how that works.
Now, you do have some time period in between.
We have stopped foreclosures literally days before the auction happened and canceled the auction. But please, if you’re thinking about doing that, DO NOT WAIT UNTIL THE LAST MINUTE to try to reach out to someone to help you, because you might run out the clock. We still have to do a title search on the property and if I’m not comfortable with clear title on the property, we’re going to do a little bit of a preliminary search and if I’m not comfortable enough with clear title, then I might not be comfortable buying that property. It might be better to have it go through foreclosure and have the underlying liens wiped.
Usually does take about a week… and right now I’m recording this in the midst of the COVID crisis and title searches are taking almost two weeks right now versus before we’d get them back in three or four days. They’re taking two weeks now to get title back. So please give yourself enough time, if you are going to reach out to an investor to buy the house, that they do have enough time to run title and make sure that everything’s clear cause there could be other liens on the property.
I ran into a situation a couple of years ago, where there was a very, very, very large IRS tax lien on the property and unfortunately, the IRS tax liens trump all, and we couldn’t get it cleared and ultimately, we couldn’t buy the house because the tax lien was for more than the house was worth and the IRS wouldn’t take it off the property and there was nothing we could do. They move at a snail’s pace, So unfortunately, we couldn’t buy the house because there was an IRS tax lien that we found in the title search process.
Again… when you get your notice of default, that’s when the clock starts ticking and your notice of default will tell you when they plan on crying that out to the public, for auction. They’ll give you the date and sometimes that might get delayed. It might get moved to the next month. It might get moved to the next month. It really depends, but pay attention to those letters that you receive and if you haven’t received a notice of default yet, and you think you might’ve gotten one, again go to Georgiapublicnotice.com. It’s G-e-o-r-g-i-a spelled out, and you can actually search your property address. You can search the county. There’s a foreclosure category there. You can either search your name or the property address and it will tell you if it has been, in fact published. If you don’t see it on Georgia public notice, and you don’t recall getting anything in the mail, you should contact your lender and see if they have started the process yet.
See if they have sent you notice of default. If you haven’t, even once you get your notice of default, typically you have around 60 to 90 days from that point before the house goes up for auction, so you still have a little bit of runway time there to actually try to sell the house, if you’re going to sell the house or maybe you’ve got a cousin or a brother or whoever that might lend you the money to catch you back up on your payment. You’re going to have to pay what’s called a reinstatement amount on that note and that’s the amount of money that you need to pay to catch everything back up to normal, so that you can start making your normal payments again. So definitely check that out and make sure you’ve done your homework.
I hope this helped you out. We’ve got a lot of videos on our website on all kinds of topics about real estate. I’ve been buying houses for a number of years. It started out with me just doing it by myself. I’ve grown this company into a team. I have great team of people that I’ve hired, through trial and error over the years and I’ve got a great team of people right now. We’re more than happy to help you and if we’re not a good fit for you, we’ll let you know.
So thanks again, guys. I really appreciate it. Go to our website. Fill out the form. Someone from our team will call you ASAP, or you can just pick up the phone and call us (770) 810-5715.
Again, I’m Brad.
I hope this video helped you and you have a wonderful day.
Thanks.