Florida Foreclosure Defense: What you need to know by Roy Oppenheim

Hi, this is foreclosure defense attorney, legal blogger and commentator, Roy Oppenheim. We’re doing a segment on “In the Trenches” through our summer school program, where we’re talking about discrete issues concerning the whole foreclosure defense environment and strategic default. Today actually, I wanna talk about foreclosure defense and what that really means.

A few years ago, I’m not sure what it really meant, and in fact, when clients came into my office and they hadn’t paid their mortgage, I really wasn’t sure how I was going to able to help them. That was back in, maybe, 2007 or early 2008, but as we started to look at the mortgages, as we started to look at the promissory notes, we realized that there were just enormous violations of various bodies of law that the banks had systemically violated time and time again.

These areas of law included constitutional law, contract law, due process, standing, had to do with losing documents, making misrepresentations, committing fraud on the court, committing perjury, robo-signing issues, not having sufficient knowledge to sign documents. I mean, it was just one issue after the other that we were finding because what happened was, the banks, in their haste to try and securitize these mortgages and sell them off to little old women in Europe who didn’t realize what they were buying and creating, ultimately, this great recession that we’re still in, or that we’re trying to come out of.

They, in their haste, committed one illegal act after another that is distracting their ability to get their mortgages foreclosed in a timely fashion, and that is how the practice of foreclosure defense was built. And around that practice, we have the tools and resources to then engage the bank in meaningful conversations about whether or not we wanna do a modification, whether or not we wanna do a short sell, whether or not we want to eventually leave the property without a deficiency, without even having the actual foreclosure defense hit your credit score.

These are all the tools and resources that we regularly use in the area of foreclosure defense, and what it does, it gives you time. It gives you an opportunity to move on with your life, it gives you a chance to breathe, and it allows you to call the shots instead of the bank trying to kick you out of your home without you giving it a fight. So what we say is, if you are underwater, if you have lost your job, if you’re suffering from a situation where you just can no longer pay your mortgage, you need to do something about it, and the first thing you do is to consider your options.

And one of your options is a foreclosure defense, a strategic default as well, and it’s to think about what those options are. So we’re here to help you do that. So, we hope to hear from you, and hopefully, this was helpful. Roy Oppenheim, “From the Trenches,” doing summer school on foreclosure defenses. Thank you, have a great summer.