Foreclosure Defense and Property Analytics in 2022
If this is your first visit to my website, welcome! My name is Christine Springer and I'm the founder of Desert Edge Legal Services and the author of the content on this site.
Disclaimer: I’m a paralegal, not an attorney and cannot give you legal advice. This is not meant to be legal advice, and there is no guarantee that the information in this post will work for your individual situation. Please consult with an attorney if you have questions about your individual situation.
You may know that I worked with homeowners in the last real estate crash. I offer property analytics services that involve examining a loan for all sorts of problems to help the homeowner mount a legal defense to foreclosure.
Things slowed down in 2013 in the foreclosure world, and although I have been paying attention to things generally, I took a break to do some search engine optimization and content marketing for a few years. I had a couple of contract paralegal gigs that lasted about a year each, and then the pandemic happened and I returned (temporarily) to St. Louis to be with family.
My family issues are wrapping up in St. Louis and I’m ready to go back home to Arizona, and I’m also looking forward to getting back into my business.
However, the transition from doing nothing to getting my business back up has been interesting.
Some of my lawyer connections started networking last spring, because lawyers who work with consumers are always busier when economic conditions aren’t great.
I have been monitoring keyword alerts to keep on top of interesting case law and other foreclosure defense news, and wondering whether it was time to begin marketing my property analytics services again.
Although there are new blog posts and advertisements showing up in my alerts several times a week, I’m still not positive there will be a major real estate crisis where large numbers of people will lose their homes.
We might be in trouble with the economy, or this could just be the beginning of things trending in favor of Main Street instead of Wall Street.
It sounds crazy, I know…but the housing market and the stock market have been disconnected from reality for years now. I’m personally not convinced that using the old benchmarks, such as the stock market and unemployment, are useful for gauging how well the economy is doing.
I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos on a potential real estate crisis, what is happening in China, particularly with Evergrande and other property developers, along with a lot of other economic analysis. I’m especially concerned about contagion from the Chinese economy and their real estate sector. It looks as if the investors will not be prioritized and bailed out by the Chinese government.
If we see a major contagion from the massive unpaid dollar-denominated bonds throughout the world economy, the rest of the world’s economies could also suffer.
The real estate default situation in China is much worse than the situations with Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers that unfolded here in the US in the 2000's.
I also think the US has its own problems related to the moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures, and probably many other the novel legal issues that have arisen. In fact, I'm certain that there will many more legal and other issues that will have to be worked through as we move out of the pandemic.
All of this leads me to conclude that things don’t look so good for real estate and there’s a reasonable possibility that foreclosures could go up.
This is all a very convoluted way of announcing that I’m now offering property analytics services to homeowners who may need help keeping their homes.
This weekend, I will be starting a series of foreclosure defense posts to help people find me on the internet, and to help educate people who might be interested in my services.
Please know that I hate fear-based marketing and the-sky-is-falling sensationalism. I dabbled in that 15 years ago while writing about this topic, which is interesting to me. Fake news, alternative facts, misinformation and disinformation are a huge problem now.
I will not market based on fear. I want people to feel empowered when they use my services.
At the same time, forewarned is forearmed. I think people appreciate knowing what to expect when going through the process of dealing with foreclosure or just deciding what to do with their property. Things are scary enough in this process.
I’ll be sharing more with you about myself, my methods for finding ways to fight the bank, what I look for in a property analytics review and analysis, and many other topics. Some will be from the things I learned during the last foreclosure crisis.
And if you’re worried about losing your home now, take heart. Things are so much better this time around than in the last crisis. There are more options for keeping your home, if that is what you decide to do, and in some states the anti-deficiency laws make it easy to walk away if you decide that’s in your best interest.