Buyer Of Foreclosed Home Illegally Gives Unwitting Tenants The Boot Without Prior Notice, Ignoring Federal Protections Against Foreclosure Evictions

In Mableton, Georgia, WXIA-TV Channel 11 reports:

• It should not have happened: A family's belongings in heaps; and the family -- Patrick Duff, Sasha Davis and their now 10-day-old daughter Mia -- evicted from their rented house in Mableton on Thursday morning, without any warning, they say, insisting they did not know that their landlords had lost the home in a foreclosure on the Cobb County Courthouse steps. "The rug was yanked out from under us," Duff said on Thursday.

• "It says to me that something is very awry," Karen Gandolfo, an Atlanta mortgage and foreclosure consultant, said on Friday. "It says to me that there's the possibility that due process wasn't served."

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• Maggie Kinnear of Atlanta Legal Aid told 11Alive News that what happened to Duff and Davis "should not happen anymore," because of the federal law signed by President Barack Obama in May, 2009 called the "Protecting Tenants At Foreclosure Act." She said the law was meant to prevent evictions of tenants when the landlords lose the houses in foreclosure.

• "If the tenant has a lease," which Duff and Davis did, from February, 2010 until February, 2011, "the law says they cannot be evicted after the foreclosure, they can stay on the property until the lease expires." If the buyer of the foreclosed house is not a financial institution or private investor, if it is someone who intends to move into it and live in it, then the tenants' lease is null and void, but "they must receive 90 days' notice to vacate," Kinnear said.(1)

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• Duff and Davis said about the only contact they've had with the [foreclosed landlords] in recent weeks was on Thursday afternoon, a few hours after the eviction, when the[y] gave them their deposit back, a check for $1,600 -- their first and last months' rent.(2)

For the story, see Family Evicted Despite Law Protecting Tenants From Landlord's Foreclosure.

(1) According to the foreclosure deed recorded in this matter, the foreclosure sale took place on October 5, 2010, and the property was purchased by an outfit called REO Funding Solutions, LLC.

(2) While failing to tell the family the home was in some stage of foreclosure wasn't a very nice thing to do on the part of the now-foreclosed landlord, the Federal Protecting Tenants At Foreclosure Act takes the former owner off the hook for any responsibility for illegal evictions in violation of the statute and places it on the purchaser at the foreclosure sale, and any subsequent purchasers. The attention given in this story to the former landlords for failing to inform the tenants of the foreclosure (but who at least refunded the family of their security deposit) should be redirected to the lowlife(s) who now own(s) the home, and, if applicable, the snoozing judge who rubber-stamped the eviction proceeding without regard to the legal rights under the Federal law of any non-owner-occupants in possession of the home.