Florida Foreclosure & Creditors’ Rights

Florida law requires homeowners associations to be joined in the foreclosure complaint to preserve the lender’s safe harbor on assessment liability; condominium associations work differently, preserving safe harbor as long as the association is eventually made a party. Either way, association records aren’t always easy to track down, and a routine title search can miss that a property is governed by an association at all — let alone a master association layered on top of it.

We run our own investigation on every file to identify every association with a claim on the property, so our client isn’t left facing an outsized assessment obligation after the auction because something wasn’t named in time.

A manufactured or mobile home doesn’t automatically become part of the land it sits on. Until its DHSMV certificate of title is retired, the home can remain titled as a vehicle — legally separate from the mortgage on the land beneath it. We identify and describe the home correctly in the legal description so title stays clear and marketable, and retiring it after a successful sale is straightforward rather than a post-sale scramble.

It matters beyond the sale, too: HUD and VA conveyance of REO depends on clean, marketable title, and an outstanding mobile-home title is exactly the kind of defect that can hold up a conveyance claim.

A borrower’s death doesn’t stop a foreclosure, but it changes how we get there. Rather than wait on a probate court, we run our own investigation with trusted vendors to identify known heirs, so all interested parties can be named in the initial complaint. Naming everyone up front — instead of discovering an heir mid-case — is what keeps these files moving to final judgment instead of stalling.

Florida requires the note and mortgage attached to the foreclosure complaint — and that includes every modification that changed the loan’s terms, not just the original instrument. If a loan was modified and that modification isn’t pled and proven, a properly contested case can be lost on that basis alone. We reconcile the full modification history against the servicing record before a complaint goes out.

When a property sells to a third party at auction for more than the judgment amount, we move quickly to make sure the surplus isn’t overstated before it’s distributed. That means promptly accounting for post-judgment expenses and post-judgment interest that accrued between entry of judgment and the sale, so our client is made whole before remaining funds go to junior lienholders or the former owner.