By: Las Vegas Now Staff
Some renters in the Las Vegas valley have found out the hard way that the home they are renting is in foreclosure.
“There is a possibility that your owner has stopped making payments, which was a huge shock, said Kina Foster, a concerned renter.
“When we moved into the condo, one of the things that we were really concerned about was renting from a private owner because of this fact.”
Often renters are only given a few days to vacate the property. Foster says it would cause a great hardship to try and pack her belongings on short notice.
Las Vegas Constable Bobby Gronauer helped push for the bill after his constables kept seeing renters surprised by eviction notices, “The way that the federal law is set up right now, the only person that has to be notified that there is a foreclosure is the owner of the property.”
Faced with her landlord's possible foreclosure, Foster began to looking for a home to buy, no longer counting on anyone else to pay the mortgage. Luckily, in her case, she had a few months to look, but that is not always the way it works.
10 steps to find out if your rental home is in foreclosure
“If they come to us and it is like a week until they have to be out, they're going to have to go to a hotel or a family member or find some way, because it is going to take at a minimum in most cases at least 30 days,” said Nick Nolf with Remax.
Nolf says he's received several panicked calls from renters looking to find a new home quickly. Giving them more time is the goal of a bill going before the legislature this session.
The bill would require law enforcement to serve a notice to renters as soon as the foreclosure process begins, giving them time to find a new home, “Figure out a way to protect that tenant that does pay their rent all the time, on time, and has no idea the house is in foreclosure.”
The constables both in Las Vegas and Henderson helped come up with the bill. They say these surprise evictions keep putting their constables in precarious positions and it would help everyone if renters were just given enough notice.
The constables worked on just one of several bills that are going before the legislature to address this problem. If passed, the bill will likely be in effect by the end of the year.
I was also the victim of a house we were renting that went into forclosure. How do we as renters protect ourselves from this happening again? We always paid our rent on time & kept the property in excellent condition & the property management company that was overseeing this rental has kept our deposit & refuses to give it back even though they have no intention of giving it back to the owner. Is there a website we can check to see if the home we are now renting is not going into forclosure as well.Also, how do we go about getting our deposit back?
Comment by Rose Bucher — February 12, 2009 @ 10:26 am
I discovered my landlord was not paying his mortgage when one of those loan modification solictating post cards came in the mail. I called the recorders office and a notice of default had been filed on the property less than one month after I moved in. I researched and found out that it takes 120 days before a foreclosure notice can be filed on the property. He claims to have resolved the problem and stopped the foreclosure proceedings. Shouldnt there be a document on file showing the property is no longer in default? I have checked the recorders website and other than the default notice, there is no other documents on file for this property and owner. Yes, I did research the property prior to me moving in and at the time there was nothing on file anywhere to indicate there was a problem with the property. There should be a law making it illegal for an owner to rent a property that is in default and foreclosure. That to me constitutes fraud.
Comment by Leslie Morehead — March 12, 2009 @ 10:55 am