I asked the attorney to give me the complete foreclosure accounting, not the summary he’d sent me. He said he’d already provided everything, but my daughter told him we’d be filing a formal records request if he didn’t. The next afternoon an envelope arrived with eleven pages I’d never seen before. There were attorney fees, filing fees, mailing fees, inspection fees, and then the forty-one-thousand-dollar charge for “asset recovery services.” I asked what assets they had recovered. The attorney said the company had handled the property after foreclosure, including securing the house, coordinating the sale, and preparing it for auction. I said that couldn’t possibly cost forty-one thousand dollars, especially because the house was occupied until the sheriff removed me and the auction happened less than three weeks later. Then I looked at the invoice. It had been issued six months before the foreclosure.
My daughter pulled the company filing while I was still sitting there. It had been created in August 2024, two months before my house was sold, and the registered agent was a woman whose name I recognized from the association’s records. She had been the person who sent me the first violation notice about my flag in 2022. I asked the attorney whether the association had hired her company before my foreclosure. He said the contract had been approved by the board. I asked him to show me the board vote. He said it was in the minutes. My daughter found the minutes online, and there was no vote. There wasn’t even a meeting that month. Then we noticed something else: the invoice for forty-one thousand dollars was dated three days before the company was legally registered. I called the county and asked for the foreclosure file. The clerk pulled it up and said the association had submitted a proposed distribution of proceeds before the auction even happened. The document already listed the exact forty-one-thousand-dollar payment.
I went back through every document from the foreclosure and found the thing that finally explained why they had been so determined to take the house over a flag. The “asset recovery” company wasn’t just connected to the woman who had issued my violation. Its mailing address was the same address used by the association’s attorney, and the bank account listed on the invoice had a second authorized signer. My daughter recognized the name immediately. It was the board president. I asked the attorney why the president was authorized on the company’s account, and he stopped answering my questions. Then my daughter pulled the auction records and compared the winning bidder with the company filings. The house had been sold for $211,000, but the winning bidder was an LLC created six days before the auction — and its registered agent was the same woman who had been paid the $41,000 “asset recovery” fee.
