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If You Are in a Nonjudicial Foreclosure State

Because nonjudicial foreclosures proceed outside of court, you’ll have to file a lawsuit to get a judge’s attention. And you’ll have the burden of proof because you want the judge to stop a proceeding—the foreclosure—that is already authorized by the mortgage.

You’ll most likely need to hire an attorney to succeed, although Nolo’s Represent Yourself in Court will provide extremely helpful guidance if you choose to do this yourself. Unfortunately, litigation in which an attorney’s services are used is always expensive when you have the burden of proof. So unless the lawyer thinks you have a very good case, you may not want to bother with a lawsuit. If the only basis for your challenge is that the foreclosing party made a technical procedural violation, you’ll probably gain only a few weeks of delay even if you win.

To get your day in court to challenge a nonjudicial foreclosure, you must sue the lender and the foreclosing agent (typically, the trustee). In the lawsuit, you ask the court to enjoin (stop) the foreclosure proceedings until a judge can hear your reasons as to why the foreclosure shouldn’t proceed as scheduled.

In this kind of lawsuit, you typically ask the court for three things, in this order:

• a temporary restraining order
• a preliminary injunction, and
• a permanent injunction.

Your application for a temporary restraining order (TRO) must convince the judge that you will suffer “irreparable injury” if the judge doesn’t stop the foreclosure immediately. Because you will lose your home if the foreclosure is allowed to proceed, most courts accept that a foreclosure causes irreparable injury.

TROs are typically granted without a formal notice or hearing, which means the foreclosing party may have only a day or two of notice in which to prepare a response. If no response is filed, the judge may well grant the TRO, but require you to post a bond to protect the foreclosing party from economic harm in case you lose. A bond can be costly, assuming you can get one at all. You might be able to get the bond requirement waived if your income is low enough.

The TRO will typically last until the date set for a hearing on whether the court should issue a preliminary injunction—which would stop the foreclosure pending a full trial on the matter. A hearing on the preliminary injunction is typically held between ten days and two weeks after the TRO is issued.

At the preliminary injunction hearing, the court will review each party’s paperwork—essentially the same paperwork submitted in a judicial foreclosure hearing, described earlier. At this hearing, the court must decide whether or not:

• you are likely to prevail at a trial, and
• the injury that you would suffer from the foreclosure outweighs the injury that the foreclosing party is suffering by not getting paid (called balancing the equities).

If the judge decides these issues in favor of the foreclosing party, the TRO will end, and your lawsuit will be dismissed.

But if the judge decides these issues in your favor, then the judge will issue a preliminary injunction. The preliminary injunction may order the foreclosing party to take corrective action—for example, by issuing a new pay-off statement and giving you a chance to reinstate the mortgage. Or it may simply keep the TRO in effect.

Because it often takes a year or two to bring a case to trial on a permanent injunction, getting a preliminary injunction is pretty much equivalent to a victory for you. Typically, if and when a preliminary injunction issues, the foreclosing party will either attempt to reach a settlement with you, drop the current foreclosure and begin from scratch, or meet any conditions laid down by the court and then go back into court asking that the injunction be lifted.

The burden is on you to prove that the foreclosing party didn’t comply with state laws or the terms of the deed of trust. You meet this burden with the documents you file—typically, declarations or affidavits from you and various witnesses that establish the facts you believe entitle you to stop the foreclosure. For example, if you contest the accuracy or legality of the fees the foreclosing party required you to pay to reinstate the mortgage, you would attach a sworn statement to your application for a TRO or preliminary injunction, setting out the facts as you know them.

If the foreclosing party produces documents that legally or factually contradict yours, then you will need to convince the judge at the preliminary injunction stage that you deserve to have the foreclosure put on hold until you can produce your full case at trial. Because most preliminary injunction hearings don’t involve live witnesses, your paperwork may pretty much have to carry the day.