Selina James-Deming, vice president of property management and leasing with the Long & Foster Cos., which manages rental homes, is seeing a small but growing number of local tenants being displaced by foreclosure.
"They're kind of between a rock and a hard place," she said. Until the auction, "their contract isn't void. It creates huge uncertainty."
Long & Foster makes its client property owners sign an agreement that they're up to date on their mortgages and other obligations, but not everyone is honest. In one case, tenants moved in, only to find that the landlord had stopped paying while the home was being marketed, James-Deming said.
Something similar appears to have happened with the Frederick Avenue home near the Baltimore city-county line that Phavone was renting. She said she moved in last August. At the end of that month, the lender took the property back at foreclosure auction, according to Alex Cooper Auctioneers' records.
David McIlvaine Jr., a real estate agent hired to handle the property, showed up the day of the eviction thinking the rowhouse was probably vacant and the eviction would be merely a formality. Grass on the front lawn had sprouted two feet high.
But a boy looked out an upstairs window soon after Saunders, the sheriff's deputy, banged on the door. Phavone's cousin and his wife, who were visiting, answered the knock with bewildered looks.
Phavone rushed back from the errand she had gone out to run, thinking there was a misunderstanding she could clear up. "I pay him every month," she said, referring to one of the two people who had borrowed to buy the house.
"They don't own it anymore," McIlvaine explained. "The bank owns it. They haven't been paying the mortgage for eight or nine months."
Slowly, the story revealed itself. When Phavone received the sheriff's notice of impending eviction a month earlier, she'd thought it was an attempt to track someone down about an unpaid bill. She didn't recognize the name on the document, she said, because it didn't belong to the man to whom she sent the checks - instead, it was his co-signer on the mortgage. Phavone was aghast to hear she was supposed to pack up and leave immediately. (She eventually moved in with someone she knew nearby, McIlvaine said later.)
McIlvaine, who didn't want to toss Phavone out with nowhere to go, agreed to give her a week. He told her to call if she needed help finding another place to rent. He offered to share the name of an attorney to try to get back her $1,200 security deposit. And no, he said, she would not have to send a final month's rent to the former owners.
Phavone, 30, retreated to her living room, her life thrown into disarray.
"I don't want to move out," she said.
jamie.smith.hopkins@baltsun.com
