Begin here if you are about to act on something you read on PostForeclosureRecovery.org. These pages are written for people whose home has just gone through a foreclosure auction, and the points below mark where the reach of any website ends for a person with a deadline in front of them.
Who stands behind these pages
Everything here is written, paid for and kept up by a private organization of post foreclosure specialists and advocates. It runs as a business, and some readers will go on to become its clients. The organization keeps no sale money, rules on no claims and mails no notices, so a notice or a court paper that landed on you came from the party named on the face of it, and that is the party whose deadline you are counting against.
The specialists take on the legwork a former owner or an heir would otherwise chase down alone: tracing where the money sits, drafting and filing the paperwork, minding the deadlines, and clearing the snags that stall a claim. Many readers reach these pages with a court date only days out, which is why the writing is laid out the way a public help desk lays out a handout. Facts in order are what a person short on time can act on.
General information, and not legal advice
Everything on this site speaks in broad terms about a process that fifty state legal systems and the District of Columbia each run their own way. It is general information, not legal advice, not a legal opinion, and no stand-in for a licensed attorney who has read your documents. Statutes are summarized with their exceptions left out, and statutes get amended, so open your own documents and confirm the current rule where your property sits before you rely on anything printed here. For an eviction or any genuine dispute, you can also take it to a licensed attorney in your state, or to the legal aid office that serves your area, and the clerk of the court named on your papers can say what that court offers.
The deadlines here are general; your papers control
Each deadline described on this site is only the general rule, and yours may run differently. It turns on your state, on the manner and the day you were served, on the wording of your particular notice, on court holidays and local practice, and on facts no web page can see. Count from the documents in your hands, not from a sentence on a screen. When a date is near, get someone qualified to count it with you that same day.
Eviction cases and where a licensed attorney fits
If removal from the property is on the table, a written answer to the court case falls due on a deadline your state sets, and that deadline is short. The specialists help you hit it, pull the record together and keep the dates in your view. Where your state requires a licensed attorney to prepare or file court papers, a licensed attorney handles it. Nothing about that shifts your side of the deadline, so start early rather than late.
How a completion fee works
When the specialists take on a surplus claim, the money side is meant to be simple to read. The claim carries no out-of-pocket expense for you. Costs that surface along the way, the filing charges, the certified copies, the notary work and the rest, are advanced on your behalf. The one payment to the organization is a completion fee, drawn from the surplus and owed only once those funds are actually in hand, and its amount is set down in an agreement you sign before any work starts. Where your state requires a licensed attorney for a court or probate filing, a licensed attorney handles it, and you still pay nothing out of pocket. In California, claims by a former owner-occupant of a home sold at a trustee’s sale are handled by a licensed California attorney, because California law reserves that work for the owner’s attorney (Cal. Civ. Code §2945.4). Several states also limit a recovery company’s fee or fix particular terms for the contract.
No result is promised
No outcome is guaranteed and no forecast is offered. Whether the sale left any money, whether a claim succeeds, how long anyone may stay in a property, whether a court grants added time: each rides on facts and on rulings made by judges, trustees, counties and buyers. You will find no success rates, no dollar totals, no client counts and no reviews anywhere on this site, because none of those would tell you a reliable thing about your own case. See who does this work for the people behind it, how anything you send is handled for your information, and the remaining conditions for the rest of the rules.