In 2003, the term foreclosure was known mostly to mortgage lenders, attorneys and the few home owners who faced it. It was that year when I learned the meaning, even though I had faced it in the mid-1980's without knowing the word. All I knew was the bank wanted one of my houses because they had not received a mortgage payment in several months. Backing up just a few years to 1999, I was introduced to a very ambitious entrepreneur, who had big ideas for making money on the Internet. We built several projects together until the last one faded away.
Six months later I got a call from him and he was very excited. It turned out that he wanted me to build a family of websites that would serve to help people who were facing foreclosure. He had apparently done some research and saw that the problem would be escalating soon, so I agreed to help him.
Along the way, I learned some real estate terms that would come to use later on. I learned lending terms such as forbearance, which is a temporary delay in payments or reduction in payment amount that helps a borrower to bring the account current to prevent foreclosure. Another one is short sales, which is a process of buying a property that is facing foreclosure, for less than the home value. It stops foreclosure because the property changes ownership, while preserving the equity in the home.
We kept building one site after another, each one filled with more foreclosure terms and promise of a bright future for not only the company, but for those who joined as consultants to help us find home owners in trouble.
As the consultant base grew, so did the websites. The demand for higher-end designs and programming eventually required more programmers. So now we have flash and graphics designers, multiple programmers for the PHP and JavaScript coding and database professionals. That is a relief for me, because now I can handle more of the issues with the loss mitigation consultants.
This is a very good business; one of the best I have helped build. It does not replace the other sites and businesses that I manage though, but that is another story. I am just happy to see that Freedom Foreclosure Prevention Services has become the authority in Loss Mitigation Certification training, along with having a top-notch in-house team of mitigators to deal with the lenders. That allows us to stop foreclosure on more homes.
