(upbeat music) Hey, what's up foreclosure fix family and welcome to another episode of the Foreclosure Fix Podcast. I'm your host DJ Lojo and our goal here is simple. It's to help one million homeowners successfully navigate foreclosure. You have come to the best place online, on the worldwide web, on Spotify, on YouTube, on all the different platforms if you're facing foreclosure. I am excited about our topic today. I'm excited about what we're diving into because we are going through some headlines. And these headlines are all things that are important to homeowners facing foreclosure. We're gonna talk about how they impact you if you're facing foreclosure, what things you can do, and the best way to navigate your current situation. That being said, if you like the content that you're hearing, please do me a favor, like, subscribe, or share our podcast with someone who you know that can benefit. You can also check out a copy of our latest book called the Foreclosure Fix, 12 proven steps to beat the bank, escape foreclosure, and turn your property into a profitable asset. Anywhere books are sold. All right, with that being said, we are going to dive into our podcast. This is a new type of format that we're trying out, so please leave us some feedback, let us know what you think about it, if there are specific articles or things that you want us to talk about, we're happy to do so, but we need your feedback, we need your comments. So shoot us an email at help@theforeclosurefix.com, or hit me up in the socials, and let me know what you think about the content we are producing. Your feedback is so important to our mission of helping one million homeowners successfully navigate foreclosure. So the first article headline that we're looking at, it says, "Home owner equity turns back upwards across the U.S. in the second quarter of 2024 as home value surge." And this article came from Adam Data. They are a leading data aggregator, and they do a lot of good research. We've cited their research before on this podcast, and so this article came from them. And some of the key highlights of this article are 49.2% of mortgaged residential properties in the United States, equity rich in 2024, up from 45.8% and Q1 of 2024, matching a high point reach in the spring of last year. All right, the increase reserved, a series of three straight quarter declines and mark one of the best gains in the past five years. And so what is this basically saying? It's basically saying that if you have a mortgage on your property, about 49.2% of people are equity rich. And what I mean by equity rich is that you have enough equity in your property where you can either probably tap some of the equity, or if you were going to foreclosure, you would potentially receive a refund or a overage in the event of a foreclosure sale. And so what is this saying to you all who may be facing foreclosure? If you're in a situation where you're facing foreclosure, you may be able to sell your house, refinance, maybe file bankruptcy, or figure out a way to use some of that equity you have in your house so you don't lose your house. And that's the real big key takeaway if you're facing foreclosure of what is going on in the marketplace is that so many homeowners have equity in their homes. They just don't know how to tap it. They don't know what to do to get it. And they don't know how to best maximize their situation. And so if you're thinking and you're facing foreclosure, you're getting those letters and people are reaching out to you, you have to take a second pause and say, "Okay, what is the true value of my property "and how can I maximize this situation?" Although it's fraught with different challenges and although you may be stressed financially, you have to take a step back and really say, "What is the best way to navigate this situation?" And so as a result, as you think about the homes that are on the market right now and as you think about just the marketplace that we're in for real estate, you know interest rates are high and you know that home buyers are looking for affordable product because that's what their budgets can afford. And so when you look at your property, if you want to sell, you have to really price it appropriately and you have to make sure that you're using a competent professional to help you. And we'll dive in more into that later in the episode, but just that is the key takeaway from this article is that you probably are in a situation where your home has significant equity that you can tap to handle some of maybe some of your outstanding bills or your foreclosure situation. The bigger takeaway is that we are going to see more people filing bankruptcy over the next 12, 18, 24 months. And we've already seen this trend happen where we've seen an increase in bankruptcies in Q1 of this year. And the reason why so many people are filing bankruptcy is because a lot of people don't want to sell their house. I totally understand if you were in a house that you love and you just having some financial pressures and you don't want to sell, why should somebody force you to sell? And so that bankruptcy option is a really good option for homeowners who want to keep their house but who want to restructure their debt. And so we have seen an increase in bankruptcy filings across the clients we work with, across just the nation. And in my honest opinion, it's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's because so many homeowners have equity in their homes, they want to keep that equity, they don't want to lose it and they want to restructure their debt. And so those are the two big key takeaways is that you probably have equity in your house. And then number two, you may be a good candidate for bankruptcy if you are facing foreclosure and you're having mounting financial pressures. The next article we come across reads, "I'm a realtor. "Nars settlement may not be as good for home buyers "and sellers as they think." And this is a opinion piece, but for those of you out there who are not in the real estate world, you may not know what's going on, but it definitely changes a coming in the real estate environment. Let me just give you a highlight of what's going on. So a lawsuit was brought against the National Association of Realtors. And if you're not familiar with the National Association of Realtors, if you ever see somebody out there who calls themselves a realtor, they are a member of the National Association of Realtors. The National Association of Realtors, also known as NAR, is not just some small little organization with a couple thousand people. The National Association of Realtors is one of the largest lobbying bodies out there. They are a huge association in full disclosure, I am a member of NAR and it's a great organization and it's where realtors across the country and realtors are different than brokers and real estate agents, although you can be an agent and a broker and be a realtor, but realtor is a designation you get and you're a member of the association. You pay dues, you get education, you have to follow a code of ethics and there are lots of great things that come along with being a realtor. And so, but they are one of the largest lobbying bodies out there in real estate. As a result, they were slapped with a lawsuit and basically the lawsuit claims that their rules and their practices were artificially inflating commissions for home sellers and basically making it more difficult for home sellers to sell their home. So basically causing an undue burden against them and basically saying, hey, you line the pockets of real estate agents. Long story short, this played out in court for numerous years and eventually a settlement was reached and the settlement was about $4.18 million in damages and in addition to that, there were other things that the National Association of Realtors has to do or their members have to do in order to, you know, not have any more damages moving forward. And so this has caused a huge, huge, huge change and the way many people kind of do business. One of the big things is that before, when you would list your property on a multiple listing service and you would be able to post the commission that you're receiving. So before, if I'm a real estate agent and I want to go see a house on 123 Main Street, I would look at the listing. The listing would say the seller is offering a 3% commission to this broker. And so I would know going right in that, okay, my 3% commission or 3% compensation was available to me. But now what's going on in the marketplace is that that's no longer going to be available. And now in addition to that, you will be required as a realtor to get an agreement with the person who you are listening to property for or who you're helping show the property to. So whether you're working with the seller or buyer an agreement in writing that just says, you know, this is the compensation that you're going to receive. And so what does all this mean for you and why does all this matter? It matters because multiple things are changing in the real estate world. And when I say multiple things are changing, it's this is a new kind of territory for so many realtors with so many real estate agents and things like that. And so if you are engaging with an agent right now in the sale of your property or to purchase a property or you are an agent, then your world is going to look a little bit different. And it's not necessarily bad things, but it's just different. And so a couple of things that will happen. One, typically when you used to sit down with a realtor on a presentation of the value of your property, they would say, okay, cool, typical compensation in a real estate transaction is 6%. Although that has always been negotiable, that was kind of just the unwritten rule. And that's what people would throw out. And most people didn't know that was a negotiable thing. See, compensation has always been negotiable and it's negotiable now. But now you as a homeowner, you as a property seller, you even as a buyer that you need to know that that is something that you can negotiate. It doesn't always have to be 6% or 7% or 3% or 4%. That is something that you and the realtor or the agent you're working with can negotiate to come up with. And you could say, hey, I wanna pay you a flat fee on this sale, I wanna pay you a flat fee of X amount of dollars. And X amount of dollars could be $1,000, could be $10,000, could be whatever number you all come up with. But that is the compensation. In addition to that, it was just an unwritten rule that you as a seller would pay the commission for the other side. You may say, hey, my agent who's selling my house is working so hard. I wanna give them a great compensation package of maybe $15,000 or 3% of the purchase price. And you are comfortable with that. But maybe you say, I don't wanna pay the other side anything. And so now it is all spelled out and written out where if you don't wanna pay the other side of anything, you don't have to. And that is the big changes coming down the pipeline. It's changes to the MLS. And numerous small changes that just help disclose to you as a property seller that you don't necessarily have to just pay a certain amount of compensation to a realtor. That is very much negotiable. At the end of the day, one thing that you need to take away is that people are always motivated by their compensation. And I can't advocate any way as it pertains to how much you pay somebody to help you sell your property. But what I can tell you is that people have been and always will be motivated by the compensation. And so as a home seller, you need to be mindful of your product. You need to be mindful of the situation you find yourself in. You need to be mindful of the timeline you have to sell 'cause all those things will dictate the way in which you incentivize and compensate the professionals who are working with you. And so that is our second article. Our third article today is an interesting one. And it says, "My house was sold on the courthouse steps for $3.24 because I did not pay my $800 HOA fees." So as you all know, we talk about foreclosure on this podcast all the time. But we also talk about other things like taxes. We talk about HOA's. And we talk about other pesky things that could get in a way or encumber your title. And one of the things that people kind of fail to realize when they are buying into these HOA communities is that the HOA can impact the value of your property but also they can put liens on your property. And so this article just highlights a very interesting story where someone's house was sold on the courthouse steps for $3.24 because they did not pay their HOA fees. And the article talks about other people who have received like $10,000 liens on their property or old grandma who received. And when I say old, I do not mean that in a disparaging way. She literally was in her 80s or so, I think the article talked about. And she basically had a $10,000 liens put against her property because of the fact that she did not pay because she had a bird feeder, right? How ridiculous is that? You have a bird feeder and you're basically paying $10,000 to your HOA because they're saying it's against their rules or regulations. And so what I wanna remind you, all those listeners of this podcast and what I wanna remind you as homeowners is that you need to make sure you comply with your HOA. Yes, I understand that the fees can be excessive. I know that I have had HOA communities send us emails and letters and fines for our grass not being cut or having too many weeds. And I'm not talking about overgrown. I'm not talking about grass that looked like, it hadn't been cut in weeks. I'm talking about grass that was cut every two weeks and you get a letter from your HOA saying, you need to kill the weeds. And you're like, man, I put out weed killer, I put out fertilizer, what do you want me to do, right? I can't go out there every day picking weeds out my grass. You know, and for some of you all, it may feel like your HOA is worse than the government. Like they come around and they are driving and they're golf carts and they're inspecting. You know, I've seen things on the HOA side, everything from mailboxes to trying to get approval to fix something on your house that needs to be fixed ASAP, I get it, they can be frustrating. But, and some are overbearing, 100%. But the goal of an HOA is typically to keep a community up and make sure the standards of the community are high. And there's some who do this very well and there are others who do this very, very poorly. But at the end of the day, this is a reminder that you need to make sure that you are keeping up with your HOA dues, that you don't have any unnecessary fees. And if you're facing foreclosure, you need to realize that those fees will need to be paid if you sell your house. And so, if you are getting foreclosed on, then those fees may get wiped out in the foreclosure sale, but if they get wiped out, your position gets wiped out. And so, you can't think that, oh, I'm not gonna pay these fees or I'm not gonna do all this stuff. And, you know, when I sell, you know, I'll just get all the money I'm expecting to receive. If you're selling a house for $100,000 and your mortgage pay off is $75,000, you're not getting $25,000. If you have $10,000 in outstanding HOA fees, you're gonna get $15,000. And so, they will get their cut. And so, you need to figure out a way to negotiate with them. You need to figure out a way to talk to them. You need to figure out a way to get off the naughty list if you're on the naughty list and make sure that you're not accruing fees because those fees accrue lots of interest. They have attorneys who are filing different things. And at the end of the day, you don't wanna be in a situation where you are losing the equity we talked about earlier in the podcast to the HOA. You know, that equity belongs to you. And so, you wanna keep as much of it as possible, all right? The last and final kind of article for today is one that is targeted for real estate agents. It says, "You survived 2008. You can conquer 2024 navigating a changing real estate landscape." And the reason I bring this to you is that this article may hit home for some of the listeners of this podcast. If you are in real estate right now as a realtor, as a real estate agent, as a appraiser, as any service provider or maybe a mortgage lender, you will know that this year has been challenging for so many people because sales volumes are down. And competition is high. And competition in real estate has always been high. But really, you know, those people who maybe do it as a hobby versus those people who do it full time, you're definitely starting to see, you know, many people kind of hang up their licenses. Many people saying, you know, I thought this was gonna be one thing, but it's much harder or just different than what I thought. And so, as a result, I highlight this article because there's a couple of things that you may find or you may see as a homeowner facing foreclosure. One, if you are somebody who is in the real estate industry, you need to really look at your finances because you may be in a situation where you made six figures plus in previous years and this year you may not make that much. And so you have to really make sure that you have a pad and a cushion and just some protection and some margin in your life in this season because, you know, our compensation is variable and it's variable 'cause we don't know how much we're gonna make year to year, but it's also variable in the sense that people are gonna negotiate harder with you and that's really, really important. Now, if you're a homeowner facing foreclosure and you're looking at this, this is also a reminder too that you may start getting increased activity from real estate agents. And what I mean by this is that when things are awry in any industry, you have numerous changes coming down the pipeline and you have people who are struggling, right? You need to understand that people go back to the basics. And when you think about a realtor, a realtor or a real estate agent is a salesperson and as a salesperson, what do you do? You start going back to the basics. You start making those phone calls, you start having those touch points. You start just going back to the things to help you generate new business. And so you may be seeing increased conversations, increased activity from people wanting to help you sell your house, from people wanting to touch base with you, from people who want to give you broker price opinions. And so your phone may be ringing more if you're a homeowner facing foreclosure with people trying to help you sell the property. And so just expect that that is the case because in this market right now, people are looking for ways to generate revenue and it's hard. It's very difficult and challenging. And at the end of the day, it is true. If you survive 2008, you can conquer this year and that's what business is all about. That's what life is all about. It's about embracing new challenges, overcoming them and knowing and filling that you can get to the next spot. And if you're in foreclosure, that's the same thing that you need to do. You need to embrace the challenge ahead of you, know that you can get through this and get ready for what is ahead. And so with that, that brings me to my favorite part of the podcast, which is our bow tie round. It's where you are listeners, get to tie one on with your host, DJ Elojo. And the B and bow tie round stands for your best advice for somebody facing foreclosure. The O stands for one thing you're grateful for right now and the W stands for your wildest or most interesting foreclosure related story. The B and bow tie round, my best advice if you're facing foreclosure is to stop and do something right now that relaxes you. And that may be taking a walk and maybe going outside and getting a breath of fresh air. It may be just closing your eyes for a minute or two minutes or five minutes and just taking it all in. I think sometimes what happens in life is that we get overwhelmed with the current situation we're in. When things look bleak and the walls feel like they're caving in. And what I always like to tell people is that take a second and regroup, recalibrate your thoughts, recalibrate your life and then you're able to proceed in a better way. And so if that's you right now and you have stacks of mail mounting up on your desk or at your home and you feel like everyone's against you, stop, take a deep breath, go for a walk, close your eyes, meditate, do something that relax you and then start again. And that's my best advice for you today. It changes the way I view situations. When I'm upset, when I'm mad, when I'm frustrated, taking that pause and then coming back to it allows me to have fresher eyes on the situation and not just the same kind of demeanor I had before. All right, the next thing I'll say to you is the one thing I'm grateful for right now are teachers. And I say I'm grateful for teachers because my kids go back to school today. And yes, if you're listening to this podcast, it is Monday and yes, they go back to school today and y'all, I am so grateful. I am ecstatic. The summer has been great, we had a phenomenal time, but I am ready for them to get back into school so I can get back to work, right? And so as a result, I'm so grateful for the teachers who do young men and young women's work in the school system and I appreciate all that y'all do. And hey, I love each and every one of y'all, the ones who teach my kids and the ones who don't because y'all are special. So I'm grateful for teachers. My wildest or most interesting four-closer-related story comes from a story I just recently heard actually. And it's quite interesting because as we've been talking about realtors and all the things going on in the real estate environment and we talk about real estate brokers and things like that, this one kind of hits home on the real estate agent and broker side. And so this property is a unique situation and one of my buddies told me about kind of a situation that they're in as a lender. And so my buddy is a lender and he provided a pretty significant loan to a property to an individual on a very nice property. And so this property is worth probably about $3 million. And there was a first mortgage on a property for about, you know, $1.5 million and his company provided another $500,000 loan on the property yourself. And so now you have two million dollars of loans on a three-minute dollar property. The person who was living in the property was paying on time, everything was good, but then unfortunately, the person died. And so as a result, the payments stopped because the individual's deceased. And now the property is in probate and the administrator of the probate is kind of bad, you know, for lack of a better term. And ultimately, the first mortgage was going in foreclosure. And so my buddy who is the lender on the second mortgage was probably gonna get wiped out. And so he had to pay off the first mortgage, which obviously was a ton of money. And so now they are trying to figure out what to do. But the big thing is, and the reason why I want to bring up realtors is because that is the lender side. But this property was listed on the market and it had a buyer who was supposed to buy it on a lease purchase. And if you're not familiar with the lease purchase, it's basically where someone says, "Hey, I'm gonna lease this house for a little bit." And all my payments that I make on a lease are gonna go towards the final purchase. And when I purchase the property and a certain amount of time that could be six months, it could be a year, it could be whatever amount of time, then I am going to just kind of move forward and that's it. And in fact, if that doesn't make sense, let me just redo that real quick. Basically what happens in a lease purchase is you having agreement with somebody that they're gonna lease your house with the intent to purchase it. And they basically give you some consideration for being able to do this. And as a result, each of their rent payments, a portion of that may go towards the purchase price, but eventually you all have a strike price or specific price that you agree upon that they can purchase it within a certain amount of time. So that's how a lease purchase typically works. In this scenario, this person was supposed to put down $500, is a down payment, which is a significant amount of money, obviously, as you can see. And they were supposed to pay, you know, a significant amount per month to lease purchase the property. But this person was supposed to move into the property on July 5th. As you all can imagine, July 4th is a significant holiday and they somehow finagled the keys to the property from the agent on the deal. And they got the keys from that individual and they moved in early on July 3rd and they didn't pay that $500,000 they were supposed to pay as a down payment. And on July 4th, what did they do? This nefarious individual had a big old party and they enjoyed the house and it was a grand old time. But on July 5th, they never deposited that half a million dollars, they were supposed to deposit and they're long gone. And so basically they signed this fake agreement or not a fake agreement and it was a real agreement, but they had no intention of fulfilling their agreement and they basically threw a huge party in somebody's house and the lender doesn't like it, the administrator of the estate doesn't like it, and it may be some lawsuits being thrown around as a result of it. And so what I always like to remind people in stories like this is that there are so many little things that probably went wrong here that allowed this to transpire. But as we're talking about compensation, as we're talking about how you negotiate, as you're talking about all these different things with real estate, one thing you gotta remember is that the people you work with on your real estate transaction will have a very strong role in the type of outcomes you get. And so when you're choosing your professional to work with on a real estate transaction, you need to make sure that you're betting that individual, that you're choosing somebody who has experience and what you want them to do and that they can provide you with the services and the solutions that you need. And so that is the big kind of takeaway from that story. It is a wild story that is still unfolding, but it's just a reminder that you need to make sure that you choose good professionals to help you, especially when you're facing foreclosure. That brings us to the end of another podcast today. As always, shoot us some comments, give us some feedback on how you like this format, on if this works for you, if it was beneficial, or if you're like, "No, I don't do this no more," let us know. We are always updating, changing and modifying our content because we wanna help people the way in which they need to be helped. That being said, if you like what you hear, do us a favor, leave a five-star review, join our newsletter, or join our YouTube page. And at the end of the day, just continue to go out there and be great. As always, I love you, God bless you, and I will see you soon. The views and opinions on this podcast are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice. If you have a specific legal question, we highly recommend you contact a qualified legal professional.
