Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

As this is an area we practice there are several things you can do. First you should try to get your loan modified. You do not have to be delinquent in order to apply or get one under teh President's Plan started at the beginning of the year. You can do a short sale which means you can sell the house for less than you owe with the lenders consent. You can do a deed in lieu which means that you basically sign the house over to your lender. Lastly you can let them foreclose and sell your house. It takes the lender 3 months from the date they record a notice of default to set a sale date. Then they have to give you twenty days notice so you get approximately 110 days from the date the notice of default was recorded to when they auction off your home. Once they sell the house they send you a three day notice to quit and if you don't leave they file an eviction lawsuit which will take them a month or so to get a trial date where they would try to get a judgment of possession. Then they would have to get the sherif to come out and evict you which could also take a couple of weeks. However most banks don't move that fast and I have seen instances where the former owners have had possession of their former houses for over a year. So if they sell your house out from under you they can move you out in anywhere from two months to a year.

However you need to see a lawyer or non profit because you lender cannot make you be delinquent before they will let you apply for a modification. THAT IS WRONG! they are for a lack of a better word lying to you. They have a duty under California law to discuss options other than foreclosure with you before they can start the foreclosure process. So go get some help now.

Good luck and hope this helps.

There is both a statutory minimum time-line for the process and a wide band of actual real-world time lines for foreclosure and eviction. Very few evictions these days move on the minimum time line, because the industry is over-busy with loan modification, short sale, foreclosure and eviction activities, as are the courts and sheriffs.

In rough terms, the foreclosure process starts with a Notice of Default, which is served and recorded usually about the time someone is four months delinquent, probably these days this is stretching to six or more months for some lenders. After that, the Notice of Sale cannot be given for another three months, and the sale cannot take place on less than 20 days' notice. So, the earliest date for a foreclosure sale is 110 days after Notice of Default is given, and because under Federal law the IRS is given some extra time to file liens, the sale is rarely less than 122 days after a Notice of Default. The sale itself may also be postponed one or more times even after the original notice is given.

After sale, you will probably be given a three-day notice to quit, and, if like most folks, you don't move out in three days, sooner or later the buyer (the lender or ???) may serve you with an unlawful detainer lawsuit. You might have a defense, but probably not; in any case, forcing the suit to proceed either to trial or default judgment will give you a few more weeks.

In short, if no notice of default has been served and recorded so far, I'd say you can figure around 130 days as a minimum before the sheriff carts you away. In current realities, it may be months longer, but don't count on it.

If all of your financing was purchase-money, you are pretty safe from deficiency judgments or other problems besides losing your home and your credit rating.