Foreclosure Victim - Tenant Must Leave in 36 Hours

New Jersey tenants are some of the luckiest in the country when it comes to foreclosure issues. If they are paying their rent they can stay on the property even after its been foreclosed. The lenders may not know the Jersey's laws, but the renters should. Some lenders in New Jersey may not realize that they can not give tenants a 36-hour eviction notice, unfortunately other state's residents are not so lucky.


Imagine getting a day and a half notice that you have to pack up and leave a 4000 square foot house (or even a small 1500 square foot house) all while finding a new place to go. Some rental victims do not know they are being evicted until they receive the short notice to vacate the property. In the case of the story from MSNBC titled Evicted Tenant Shares Lessons the victim knew the property was in trouble and fought to stay in the home, but many others are not so lucky. Lets take a look at the article -

The single mother of a 12-year-old boy envisioned this day was coming. But it doesn't make getting evicted any easier.

"I have to load the contents of a 4,000-square-foot home in 36 hours," said [Susan] Hair, surrounded by a lot less mess than one would expect during the height of a move.

Hair was one of the first tenants locally to discover she'd been paying rent each month, while her landlord was not paying the mortgage.

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For Hair, the PGA National golf front home should've been a dream come true. She rented through a property management company, but wasn't told the house was already moving toward foreclosure.

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Hair saw the property ownership get bounced around, yet no one paid the mortgage. Next she received a credit card in the mail for the new homeowner who somehow got a home equity loan on the property even though it was in foreclosure.

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After the bank took over, Hair said she tried to pay the rent directly to the financial institution but it wouldn't accept her money. She said she even paid an attorney to negotiate with the bank to let her stay. That didn't work either.

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Hair wants other tenants to know she got 36 hours to move, not 30 days. She wants other renters to know that they need to be careful.

There is an accompanying video to this report, but it is not embeddable to check it out here.

Hopefully someone other than us are documenting what is really happening throughout the country to renters. The woman in this story was supposed to get 30 days notice, instead she got just 1-1/2 days. Renters are one over-looked population of this foreclosure crisis. And considering that almost 1 out of 3 people are renters it should be a bigger story.