Facing Foreclosure In Palmetto Bay? We Can Buy Your House For Cash.

They tried to save it, right up until they nearly lost it

About three thousand square feet on a quiet street. Dated, and in need of updating, but a genuinely nice house — nothing about it looked like a property in trouble, which is worth saying, because foreclosure does not only happen to houses that look the part.

They did not want to sell. We talked on and off for a long time and the answer stayed no, and I never thought any less of them for it. It was their home and they wanted to keep it.

So they decided to fight. They hired an attorney who told them a loan modification would get them out of it.

The modification never came. They did not have the income it required, and the months it took to establish that were months off a clock that does not stop. The fees were paid regardless of the outcome.

By the time we spoke again they were close to losing a house they had real equity in, and that is the genuinely frightening part of a foreclosure. It does not simply take the house. It takes everything you have built up inside it, and hands it to whoever is standing at the auction.

We paid the back taxes and we closed. They stayed on in the house for sixty days afterwards — longer than we usually do, because that is what they needed — and they left with their equity, as money, instead of watching it disappear.

There is nothing wrong with fighting to keep your house. Most people should. But the options that exist early are gone late, and the hardest thing to watch is somebody fighting so long that selling quietly stops being one of them.