The Truth About Foreclosure: Legal Insights & Financial Impact with Brandon Hans of Barr LLP

In this episode of the podcast, Len sits down with lawyer Brandon Hans to discuss the complex world of foreclosure. They break down the foreclosure process, explaining how it begins when a borrower defaults on their mortgage and the lender takes legal action to recover the debt. Key triggers for foreclosure include missed payments, failure to maintain the property, and breaches of loan agreements. The discussion covers the different approaches taken by smaller lenders versus larger banks, the legal steps involved, and the financial consequences homeowners may face, including damage to credit scores and additional costs such as legal fees and realtor commissions.

Throughout the episode, Len and Brandon emphasize the importance of early legal intervention and financial planning to prevent foreclosure. They share practical advice for homeowners, lenders, and prospective buyers, including the value of maintaining property conditions, understanding mortgage agreements, and seeking professional guidance when navigating foreclosure situations. Tune in to gain expert insights into foreclosure laws, lender strategies, and the best ways to protect yourself from the financial and legal pitfalls of mortgage default.

About Brandon Hans

Brandon joined BARR LLP as an articling student in 2016 after successfully completing the NCA accreditation process. He obtained his Bachelor of Laws from the University of Kent, Canterbury in 2014. During his time in Kent, Brandon volunteered in many student-oriented extra-curricular activities, such as the Kent Law School Mooting Program and the 2013 and 2014 Critical Law Conferences. His current areas of focus are in real estate, foreclosure law, creditor-debtor relations, and financing. In 2023, Brandon joined the partnership at BARR LLP.


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Contact Brandon Hans | Barr LLP: 

Len 00:02
Welcome. My name is Len Lane, and I am the founder and president of Brokers for Life Inc., and we are Dominion Lending Centers in Western Canada. The topic of our podcast will be about what we consider to be Real Life Mortgage Solutions. Today, we are talking with Brandon Hans, partner Barr LLP, barrister and solicitor in beautiful downtown Edmonton. We’re kind of chilly today. We’re going to talk about foreclosure and the process that happens during foreclosure. So, Brandon, welcome to the podcast.

Brandon 00:39
Thanks, Len. Happy to be here.

Len 00:41
I guess right into the nitty gritty. Foreclosure. No one ever wants to see it. We see it on credit bureaus every now and then that something’s gone awry. So, what is it for the client that actually triggers foreclosure?

Brandon 00:55
Well, I think it’s probably worthwhile to talk about what a foreclosure is before you can talk about triggering. A lot of times when I have clients come into my office, either for foreclosures or if they’re lenders, or if they’re even just buying a house, I hear the same joke that when you take a mortgage out, basically the bank or the lender owns the property, and that’s simply not the case. So foreclosure is really a lender’s resort against the property if a debt is either in default or is not paid. So, you know, put simply, it is a way to offload the property, and that might be owned by one party without that party’s permission. And so it’s basically a forced sale. It’s called, it’s been called various things throughout Alberta’s history, specifically, but you know, every province has their own version of a foreclosure, and it’s basically a lender goes to a court and says to a judge, I’m a lender. I’m owed a certain amount of money. The borrower has defaulted under the terms of our loan in some way, and I’d like to sell the property to recover the money that I’m owed. Most of the time that foreclosure is done for fair market value. This is why you’d have appraisals and real estate agents involved. And there’s a process that’s put in place through the foreclosure laws in each jurisdiction that protects borrowers as much they can, but still allows for the orderly sale of property. And so that’s, broadly speaking, what a foreclosure is. And the reason you might have a foreclosure are numerous, and it depends specifically whether or not it’s a residential mortgage or if it’s a commercial mortgage. Could be different if it’s a private mortgage, but broadly speaking, it’s just a breach of the terms of a loan. And so the biggest one, obviously, is making payments. That’s kind of the most common breach you’d see in loans. But, you know, I’ve had, I’ve handled the foreclosure of a golf course at one time that was subject to flood damage. So a river overflowed and flooded this golf course, and the golf course took it failed, to take steps to remediate the lands, to get it back to a going concern. And so obviously, if you have a golf course that grows out for years and years and years, it’s harder to bring it back to a point where you could sell it. And so that was deemed to be a breach of the loan under the kind of off, often unused, failure to maintain the land clause in a charge. So it can be kind of anything really. The most common ones that we see when it comes to foreclosures are obviously the banking payments. But then there’s kind of the laundry list of owner responsibilities. Keeping the property insured is a big one, as the property burns down and it’s uninsured, bank faces a pretty significant loss. And then there’s failure to pay property taxes, failures to pay condominium fees. In situations where you might have first and second position lenders. It’d be failure to pay the first position lender or the second position lender, whatever that may be, properties abandoned, properties used for something it’s not intended. And so you know, it’s not common that this happens. But if somebody buys a residence and tries to convert it to a restaurant or something like that, that technically would violate your mortgage, right? Because it’s not what it was underwritten for. And so those are all kind of broad triggers as to what causes a foreclosure. Most of the time, when people go and see their lawyer and they sign the mortgage, the lawyer will have this rather long, you know, usually, 30 page document that they give to the the client, and they say, you should this is what you’re signing on to when you sign up the mortgage. It’s almost like the iTunes agreement for a loan, and most of the time, people don’t read them unless something goes wrong. And kind of all the triggers of a foreclosure are found in that document, and that kind of outlines specifically what the foreclosure does. So yeah, it’s numerous. It’s not it’s not a one size fits all type of trigger, but, yeah.

Len 04:44
Just even thinking of that failure to maintain, I’m saying that would not just be a golf course that would apply to regular residential as well. Come to tthink about it.

Brandon 04:53
Yeah, it could. It could, like, let’s say, let’s say you had a property, and it was, it was tentented, and. Tenants trash the entire inside of the house. Well, if that damage is not remediated, then that would also be a trigger, right? And so the way to think of it is the lenders’ security, and it doesn’t matter if this is a bank or a trust company or a MIC or any, anyone who’s lending money the bank security is tied up to the value of the house, or value the property, if the bill, if the property can’t sell, or it sells for less than what the appraised value should be, the bank or the lender will be upset in that situation. So, you know, I often tell people, you know, if you’ve got mould damage, you got to remediate the mould damage. If a tree falls out, through the roof, through a windstorm, you got to fix the roof like these are things that you probably would normally do as an owner, in any event, but should be done as a matter of course for your mortgage as well.

Len 05:50
Right? We have seen people probably more times than I can count over the last 18 years that have come in and said, I’m buying this house and then I’m going to tear it down and build another house, and I’m going, okay, because as the bank, no, you’re not going to do that. You can’t just tear it down. You have, you have a mortgage. You’re going to have a mortgage on it, and you have to, we have to work out a better plan than what you have at the moment, so.

Brandon 06:16
Yeah, and I, and to that point, I have a lot of clients come through and say, Yeah, I’m planning on, on doing some significant renovations of this property. Well, that’s also a trigger of a foreclosure. If you, if you go into a property and you start banging out walls, and you take out a load bearing wall, and you don’t know that renovation in its own right could be a breach of the loan, because, you know, the bank wants to make sure that the roofs not going to cave in on you, which, which is a another thing entirely. And you know, frankly, when it comes to lenders being involved in the transaction, they often don’t say, no bigger lenders may so if you wanted to bring in a partner onto a loan, let’s say you’re you bought a property individually, and you want to bring your husband or your wife onto title, well, that technically, is a breach of the loan as well, and that would trigger a foreclosure if that person hasn’t been vetted by the bank. And so basically, as long as, as long as you’ve kind of stay within the bounds of your loan agreement, and then there shouldn’t be a foreclosure. And I say shouldn’t, because I’ve had situations in the commercial side where a borrower has never missed a payment, but got ensnared and in a COVID loan, which the the government, federal government, erroneously pulled a COVID loan back, which was under appeal, and had the bank foreclose under the property, even though They’ve never missed a payment. And so, you know, it gets a little bit more complicated when you have more money involved. But for the average residential property, foreclosures are usually missed payments. Everything else is kind of, ti can all usually be fixed.

Len 07:54
Yeah, it seems that that missed payment thing is pretty much 95% of what we see. So at what point do you become involved? And from your standpoint, is it more that you’re involved with the mortgager or the mortgagee?

Brandon 08:09
That’s a good question. There’s no really, there’s no specific answers. When a lawyer gets involved, smaller lenders, or maybe model line lenders to your B lenders, they generally get involved quicker. Generally, security is not as good, and they often hire lawyers who are pit bulls, I guess, people, people who don’t necessarily want to work to sort out a problem, but they just want to run through the motions. And there it can be very difficult to deal with, even when I’m a lawyer dealing with them, right? So those types of lenders get involved a lot quicker. If it’s a kind of a major tier A bank or a big monolith lender like a first national they often don’t get involved until there’s several months of missed payments and several letters. They give a lot of leeway for people to kind of dig their way out of problems. And if you have private lenders, private lenders generally engage lawyers as soon as there’s a missed payment, because they need coaching to run through the enforcement procedure that might not be required for a larger lender. And so it really depends who the lender is as to when the lawyer gets involved. Now, when it comes to what I do, let’s back up here. Big lenders have lots of foreclosure, the bigger the lender, the more foreclosures they have. And so someone like Toronto Dominion generally needs a team of lawyers to handle foreclosure matters, kind of, day in, day out, day in, day out. And so, you know, those are bigger law firms that have, you know, a rather large litigation support team, and they go from there. The smaller, the smaller lender you get, or the more boutique type of loan it is. You more engage with somebody like me, who does you know the placement of the loan as well as the enforcement or potentially defense of the loan. And so you often will see more lawyers the more dollars involved. In terms of who I represent or who who lawyers mostly represent, they often don’t represent the borrower, right? So the mortgage, or in the situation, the person borrowing the money, if they’ve missed their mortgage payments, they very rarely have the money to pay a lawyer to handle a defense. And weirdly enough, out of all the litigation, you’ll see foreclosures are very rarely something you can defend against, right? So, so if you’ve not missed, if you not made your payments, there’s not really a defense to that non payment, really the only defense would be one fraud. I didn’t sign this mortgage you’re trying to enforce against me, and I’m not the borrower. Or two, your numbers are all wrong. I paid you back. But then you get into the issue there, if some people try to allege that I paid you back with a promissory note, or, you know, I signed under a different name. These are kind of conspiracy theories to try and get out of debts. They don’t really work, but people still try them. And so, yeah, it’s there’s really not much of a defense to it. And so even if I have clients call me with money, saying, What do I do here? The best we normally do is what’s called a forbearance agreement, which is a kind of a pause to the foreclosure proceedings to allow a refinance to go through. Right? So I had one that we closed late January, a client came to me. They had a couple of apartment buildings. They were in a foreclosure. They actually already had a new lender lined up, and they just needed some time to cross the t’s and dot the i’s. And so we ended up executing an agreement which paused the action. The clock still ran an interest but no legal fees accrued, and gave us time to complete the takeout financing. So that’s what you mostly see lawyers coming involved in on the borrower side, is kind of delays and payouts.

Len 11:50
So once the action has started for the homeowner, are there? Are there many, obviously, the ramifications are against your credit. Obviously, we see that from time to time, a foreclosure on your credit for the CMHC involved, is the kiss of death for mortgages. You’ve ever are able to buy something with less than 20% down, and most likely, you’ll end up in the private world for for quite some time, because CMHC is like the elephant. They, they do not forget that they, they share that information with SAGEN, and can be guarantee. I’m not sure what breakfast club that is, but it’s they know that that never goes away, it seems, for the homeowner, unfortunately, so.

Brandon 12:32
Yeah, I certainly there certainly is one of the main ramifications, but it’s a little bit more than that too. You know, the kind of the glaring thing for the homeowners, you lose your house, right? Like that’s kind of you’re out in the street. But you also gotta remember too that under most mortgages, the the provisions in the mortgage allow for all the collection costs by the lender to be added to the debt. So if you have equity in your property and you go let it go through foreclosure, you end up paying the foreclosing lawyer, the foreclosing realtor, foreclosing appraiser, any property managers they inspect. And so, like, you basically pay the bank to see yourself in a foreclosure. And so, you know, biggest, biggest piece of advice that I would have to people in that situation is, is like, soon as you’re behind, and you know you’re behind, don’t let it get to a foreclosure, get it paid out, or get it refinanced or get it sold, to avoid that hit on your credit rating and to avoid paying money when you really shouldn’t have to pay it out.

Len 13:31
Right? I’m sure that, and when it’s a team on the other end, if it’s KBD or something like that, that they accumulate cost very quickly. You know, it’s, of course, the interest never really stops on it at all, right?

Brandon 13:46
Yeah, well, and it’s also, it’s weird, because different jurisdictions have different rules. So in the Calgary in the Calgary market, the courts have adopted, effectively, like, a tariff guide for foreclosing lawyers, and so they generally will, will not allow charges to go beyond that tariff. In Edmonton, it’s a little different. In Edmonton, they don’t really have that tariff, but it kind of mirrors it anyway, because a lot of those big firms operate in both those jurisdictions, they don’t really want to change their billing practices to too much, but, but yeah, it is. It can be very expensive, fairly quickly.

Len 14:23
It’s, I was interesting to watch how quickly that adds up. So you’re a majority of your business. I take it is this, and in the lending world, of course.

Brandon 14:34
Yeah, well, I mean, it’s, it’s tough to, tough to describe, because when you do, when you do real estate, generally, and there could be it could be residential, it could be commercial, could be industrial. It all kind of ties into financing as well, and so. So my practice area is primarily real estate and financing together, so whether acting for lenders or acting for buyers or sellers, but as part of that, we also have the enforcement of these types of loans if we’re acting for the lender. So it’s part and parcel to kind of the real estate world. Not a lot of real estate lawyers do the lending side. It’s more of a niche market. Because we act for a lot of private lenders, private lending institutions or organizations. We have a little bit more experience on the kind of the enforcement side than kind of the average real estate lawyer would.

Len 15:22
Yeah, and it’s a, I guess it’s a shorter chain, if it’s a private lender, private individual, of course, right? One, one person on title having forecloses. Does that take less paperwork than if it’s TD bank and you can…

Brandon 15:36
Well, it certainly depends on the lender. So you know, a lot of times when you do it, when you do foreclosure work for a private lender, that private lender is, is, it’s their money, their lending, it’s not someone else’s. And so often the record keeping is either 100% better, because it’s their own money, or 100% worse, right? And so, and a lot of times too, because nobody is kind of a misconception. People lending money. Nobody wants to foreclose. It’s messy. It takes time. You have to pay lawyers, and nobody likes lawyers. There’s a chance you could go into a default or a deficiency situation where the value of the house is less than what’s owed. And I know we’re going to talk about that later, but nobody likes doing it, right? And so on private loans, you might be able to negotiate a larger forbearance, or you might be able to get more time to do things or side deals, but you wouldn’t see it in a conventional loan. Doesn’t mean they’re not done in a conventional loan, it just means that there’s a little bit more creativity and it goes involved to it. So there’s a lot more things to be aware of at that point. But…

Len 16:39
Yeah, we kind of cringe when somebody’s trying to buy a foreclosure because especially if it’s the bank, because the bank, I don’t know what their whole process is, but on the back end, it seems to take two weeks to get an answer back on if they accepted the offer or or anything like that. But I’m sure that’s part of their their overall process, and they’re handling more than one file at a time as well.

Brandon 17:01
Well, it’s also not necessarily the bank’s fault in that situation, right? So the foreclosure process is designed to maximize the return of the sale of the property, and so the courts are kind of there standing up for the borrower, saying, well, no, you can’t fire sale this property. You have to sell it for fair market value. And so that means you might have to list it at a higher amount than the bank would want to, and then over time, you kind of slowly step the price down to get it to where it will actually sell. And so even though you don’t get the same representations and warranties on a purchase of a foreclosed property that you would for, let’s say, buying from someone who’s not in foreclosure, you, the courts are still wanting the same price points. And so there’s kind of a weird push and pull there. So there’s, there’s that one. There is that the courts will have to approve any offer that you put in, and it takes time to get in front of a judge, and it costs money to file those pleadings. In addition to that, though, the courts because in most foreclosure situations, at least before you’re into a negative equity situation, it’s actually the court selling the property, and so it’s not the bank selling it. The bank is kind of like the facilitator of that sale, but it’s it’s the courts that are selling it, and the court can’t grant you any reps and warranties, because obviously the judge who’s issuing the order doesn’t know that there’s a crack in the foundation, doesn’t know that the property floods every year like these are things that you’ll never know. And so that’s why every single offer that goes in has to be as is, where it is, because there’s never going to be any any judge who’s going to walk a property that they’re issuing a foreclosure on. And so there are some flags you have to keep in mind when you look to buy one of those properties. Now, that being said, there’s also some deals, because you’re relying on real estate agents. I had a client buy a property out of a foreclosure, and he did get it at a fire sale value. And the property was actually tagged with a Alberta Health services do not have it, do not inhabit or and so they had to do some remediation. But it turns out the property was 200 square feet larger than the listing. And so he ended up buying this property. It was quite a bit larger than than advertised, and he got the benefit of that. So, you know, there is, there is pros and cons to going through that foreclosure market. But people should, people should most definitely talk to, talk to a lawyer before they do it, because this, this can be quite large swings.

Len 19:24
Yeah, no, that “as is, where is” always scary for lenders as well, right? It’s like, what are you buying? Do you know what you’re buying, and can you even get it? You can’t even get an inspection, right? It’s pretty much down, there it is.

Brandon 19:39
Yeah. I mean it depends too, right? Like if the property is obviously, if they’ve got no list, no offers on it, you know a lender, if the lender has access to the property and they’ve secured it, they may allow an inspection, like I have, I have solicited offers or sent offers on behalf of clients to foreclosing banks with conditions, and they have been accepted. But really, that’s not the norm. That’s the exception, right? So it can be quite dicey on the purchasing side of things.

Len 20:08
Yeah, there was, I had one recently come across my desk. It was a foreclosure in Fort McMurray on an apartment that there was nothing in the apartment like no fixtures, no cabinets, everything had been taken out when, when the previous owner left with it. I guess, technically, that’s not, is not the way it should be. I guess, are they, you know, is this the owner responsible to leave it in a reasonable condition, or does it really have any…?

Brandon 20:35
I mean that technically they are so when you, when you get your foreclosure order, your sale order from the courts, it does put obligations on the owner to kind of leave it in a decent condition. But you know, what’s the risk to the borrower who has now lost their property and clearly has no money to pay any fines, and so there’s not really a whole lot you can do, even if you even if there is, you know, cut and cut and dry or black and white liability here for the borrower, you know, what’s your remedy a lawsuit that costs you money that you’re never going to enforce? And so, you know, I, I always tell people when you’re buying a foreclosed property, just it is “as is, where is” you don’t know what the condition will be at the time of closing, potentially you the the insurance for the borrower or for the bank should cover a lot of that stuff, but then you get into an assignment of insurance quote proceeds, it can be kind of frustrating to say.

Len 21:33
So we can catch that a little bit there. So the property does, does sell, but there there’s a shortfall. So what? How does that come about? While it all comes about, obviously, but what’s in the ramifications?

Brandon 21:48
Well, there’s effectively two different ways, and I’m making things simple here, but there’s two different ways that can occur. The first one is an individual who’s in a foreclosure situation is the one selling the property, so let’s back up here. When a bank starts a foreclosure, they they serve the documentation on the borrower, and in most situations, the court has to grant six months to the borrower to get their affairs in order, whether that be refinance, sell the property, pay out the arrears they have, usually six months. And so a lot of times you’ll see people go to sell their property within those six months, and they list it and it sells. But it’s not enough to cover the debts, the closing costs, with commissions and any accrued interest, the penalties that are applied to those loans that are on the property. And so that’s kind of a foreclosures in the background, but it’s a pre foreclosure short sale in that certain those circumstances, there’s kind of one of two things happens. One, the seller’s lawyer marshals all the creditors and says, We’ve listed this property for fair market value. This is the highest offer we’ve received based on the priorities of registration. These are the proposed payouts. Will you consent to this short sale? It’ll save us all time and money, rather than have to go to court. If that’s accepted, then you close one party, usually the last person on title takes a haircut. You move on. You move on with your life. And foreclosure is stopped. Proceedings are terminated, depending on where they are in the foreclosure process. There may not be a registration on the credit bureau, probably not if it’s in the early stages. Second, second option, you Marshal your creditors, and then you say, somebody says, No, I’m not willing to consent to this. Well, at that point, if you have the money to hire a lawyer to do this, or if you’re willing to do it yourself, you basically bring an application to the court saying, I’m the seller. These are the creditors. This is a fair market value judge, and I have permission to sell my own house. The repercussions here only impact this creditor who would get less money if they went through a foreclosure. So this doesn’t make a lot of sense, and a judge will say yes or no. If they say no, the deal is permanent. If they say yes, then notwithstanding, you don’t have consent, you kind of move ahead, but you’ll have to pay the lawyer to do that. So that’s kind of your in process foreclosure, or in foreclosure process short sale without the banks involved. If you get to a position where you’re a bank and you’re lending money and you’re doing your foreclosure and it turns out your property is underwater, then there’s kind of two things that happen. The first one is usually what’s called an order for sale to plaintiff. And what this does is it transfers the property from the existing owner to the bank as if they were a buyer in exchange for the debt that they’re owed. Okay, so the property transfers fully to the bank. It becomes the bank’s property, and then they can do what they want with it. They can list it, they can renovate it, they can wholesale it, and that’s outside of the court’s involvement. And so in those circumstances, they’re usually always as is, where is as well, but they’re not the court being sold. So you don’t need a court’s permission to approve a sale. It just becomes the bank’s property. The second thing that happens is, if it’s a high ratio situation, CMHC situation, they would obtain what’s called the default judgment, or deficiency judgment. The deficiency judgment is basically the difference between the loan total and what the appraised value is, and that’s a personal debt that gets registered against the borrower, and the bank can collect as they would normally, that is it with a credit card or any other, any other debt? But effectively, the property is transferred to the bank in that situation, and the individual living there is usually evicted.

Len 25:47
Right? We see the CMHC when it’s pretty rare that CMHC takes a loss, but we do see it occasionally, where the CMHC claim on the that does that become a quarter Queens Bench claim at that point.

Brandon 26:03
You know, it’s Kings Bench now, but they’re all done, so even if you bring a foreclosure, the foreclosure is through King’s Bench as a regular action. It’s just a special type of debt collection. So, yeah, it would, it would continue on after the property sold it. You know, I think you’re right. I don’t think there are a lot of, well, there certainly aren’t as many CMHC short sales for houses. We saw them a lot for condos, because a lot of condominiums lost value over the last 5-10, years. Whereas, you know, a town home or a house generally, either increases in value or retains its value. So provided the bank takes enough, takes early enough steps to kind of stem the bleeding, those properties generally would have enough to cover the covered in any losses associated with it. And this is one of the reasons why you don’t see a lot of enforcement on guarantees when it comes to commercial loans as well. Because if you buy an industrial space or a multi family space, or even like, like duplexes, or you buy side by side duplexes, those generally maintain their value. And so when the property is sold in a foreclosure, there wouldn’t be any deficiency that you’d go after a guarantor for. And so it’s not as common as people think. It certainly is a risk. And when it when it’s triggered, it is triggered pretty significantly, but it really depends on what, what your structure of your deal looks like.

Len 27:27
So pandemic obviously made some major changes in different ownership and properties, and it, was there an actual increase in in foreclosures. Do you think since the pandemic?

Brandon 27:40
Short answer is, there were increases. You did see, though, during the pandemic, a lot of payment vacations. And so this is available for most lenders, like it’s in their standard terms, whereby you can negotiate a provision of say I lost my job because of COVID and interest still accrues, but it pauses your requirement to pay for a certain amount of months. And in those circumstances, a lot of people ended up selling and kind of entering the rental market, as opposed to riding out the foreclosure. And so you did see more of them. It wasn’t as much as you might think on the private side of things, and also, it’s quite strange. It’s a phenomena that we see often, people will often pay no debts except their house, right? And so, you know, they’ll stop making car payments, but they’ll still pay their mortgage. They’ll stop making maintenance enforcement payments, but they’ll still be paying their house off. You know, it’s, it’s the, it’s the last creditor that usually gets stiffed, is the person who could take your house.

Len 28:48
So, yeah, it’s always interesting to watch. We tell clients, I guess, basically, you know, let us know if something’s happening because the last thing the bank wants to be is in owning property, right? Other than major property, they don’t want your house if they don’t have to. So there’s a you have something coming up then let us know and put in right direction, at least. We do a fair bit of work with FFP as well, right? So we collaborate with them sometimes to hopefully get people pointed in the right direction before they come to you, so, or the bank may send something to you as well. So, but it’s, it’s a reality of life. It’s different in every province. We’ve seen that over the years. Saskatchewan is a whole nother set of rules.

Brandon 29:35
Yeah. So well, and you know what’s strange with Saskatchewan is that they have such robust farm protections that you know your home quarter as of your farm is is probably more secure than any property you’ll see in Alberta in your ability to foreclose. It’s, it’s generally blocked unless you get special, special permission from the government to do it. And you know, it’s a couple of hoops to jump through. But, yeah, I mean, it’s it is a unfortunate part of borrowing, but it’s it, you know, it can be navigated if you, if you kind of take, take steps quickly with relatively limited penalties to you. You know, I’ve had the biggest problem I see with foreclosures is that people get scared and they ignore it. That’s the biggest problem. And so I hate getting calls on a Monday morning saying, Help, I have to go to court tomorrow morning, they’re going to take my house. And it’s at that point, there’s nothing you can do, you know, you you will have been eight to 10 months into the process at that time, there’s nothing you can do to stop that from happening. Whereas, if it’s, you know, I’ve received a demand letter from my bank, there’s threatening foreclosure. What do I do? Well, at that point, there’s a lot of options available to you that can basically stop all the negative parts of it, or at least most of the negative parts of it, in the long run.

Len 30:57
Yeah, it’s, yeah, we get those, oh I’m six months behind. We go like, what has what have they sent you in the mail? Is my back point, right? So. But anyways, I want to thank you for your time today, Brandon that that’s some great information to pass on to, not only to the brokers that chime in with us every couple of weeks, and of course, we we also feed these out into our newsletters as well, so that are something like 22,000 newsletters go or collectively from the team. So a lot of them add those in as well for general information. Should you be in that situation, so.

Brandon 31:35
For sure.

Len 31:36
Yeah, thanks for your time.

Brandon 31:36
It’s my pleasure.

Len 31:40
Thanks for listening today. I hope you found the information that we provided to be useful in your mortgage journey, and remember you can always find our associates at www.brokersforlife.ca/associates. Have a great day.