Foreclosure Help
Foreclosure status verification
Online sale information is frequently days out of date, and postponements announced verbally at the sale location may never appear on a website. Before you plan anything, establish the facts directly with your trustee and the county recorder.
How to find and reach your trustee
The trustee is named on the face of your Notice of Default and Notice of Trustee Sale, along with a phone number and a trustee sale number, often labeled TS number or reference number. That number is how the trustee locates your file, so have it in front of you before calling.
If you cannot locate a notice, the trustee can also be identified from the recorded documents at the county recorder's office for the county where the property sits. Search by the property address or the assessor's parcel number and review the most recently recorded instruments.
Your servicer can also tell you who the trustee is, but the servicer cannot authoritatively confirm the sale calendar. Where the two disagree, the trustee controls the sale.
Trustee call script
Read these questions in order and write the answers down as you go. The last item matters as much as the others — a name and timestamp turns your account of the call into usable evidence.
- 1State your name, the property address, and the loan or TS number from your notice.
- 2Ask: is a trustee sale currently calendared on this property?
- 3Ask: what is the exact date and time, and has it been postponed at any point?
- 4Ask: what is the current reinstatement amount and its good-through date?
- 5Ask: what is the last date I may reinstate, counted in business days?
- 6Ask: will you send written confirmation of the sale status to my email today?
- 7Record the representative's full name, employee or extension number, and the exact time of the call.
Verifying a postponement
Postponements are commonly announced verbally at the time and place of sale. There is often no new recorded document, no letter, and no website update for several days. This is the single largest source of confusion for borrowers at this stage.
Ask the trustee to confirm in writing the fact of the postponement, the reason if they will state it, and the new date and time. Then recalculate your reinstatement deadline against the new date, because it resets. A postponement is not a cancellation, and California law limits how long a sale may be continued by announcement before new notice becomes necessary.