A recent client of our law firm, who I'll call Mrs. McMillan to protect her privacy, hired us to help her elderly mother save her Florida condo from foreclosure.
Mrs. McMillan had power of attorney for her mother, who owned a beautiful condominium, worth more than $800,000, located on the water on the northern gulf coast of Florida. It has almost a half a million dollars in equity.
Usually our clients are being foreclosed on by the bank because they've missed mortgage payments, but our client's mother was facing foreclosure due to missed homeowner's association (HOA) payments.
Mrs. McMillan hired us in January of 2017, and shortly thereafter her mother passed away. Now she had to deal with the property for herself since she was the sole heir to her mother's estate.
Though she and her husband lived in Georgia, they did not want to lose the property. Their goal was to avoid foreclosure and keep the condo in the family if at all possible.
Mrs. McMillan and her husband, a doctor, were doing pretty well financially, and were able to pay the mortgage on the property. That kept the bank from trying to foreclose. But they didn't have full rights to the property and weren't able to pay all the past-due HOA fees to get out of foreclosure. It was going to take some work to fix that.
