Last week I visited a property we’d just taken possession of under power of sale.
I brought the listing realtor with me. First walk-through. You never quite know what you’re going to find.
The previous owner was clearly a collector. I can’t even begin to describe the number of interesting and unique items we found throughout that home. Every room had something.
And then we got to the bedroom.
Life-size. Incredibly realistic. Standing right there in the corner.
A witch.
I’ll be honest — she got me. Just for a second.
Power of sale is part of the mortgage administration business. It’s never something you go in hoping for, and it’s never something you take lightly. Losing a home is a real and painful experience for the person on the other side of it, and I never lose sight of that.
But it’s going to happen. It’s inevitable. And when it does, the job is to move quickly and execute well. Time is money, and there’s a lot of coordination required from the moment you take possession — listing, cleanup, legal, logistics. Our team at Unimor Capital Corporation, our licensed mortgage administration arm, has the systems in place to handle it.
Here’s what this particular power of sale reminded me of, though.
This was a mortgage we placed nearly two years ago. I’ll be honest — when it started going sideways, there was a moment of nerves. That’s natural. But when I went back and dug into the file, those nerves disappeared quickly.
The underwriting was solid. The property was understood. The market was assessed properly. The loan-to-value was right. Every box that needed to be checked at the front end had been checked.
And that’s when it hit me — the real heavy lifting in this business happens long before anything goes wrong. It happens at the underwriting stage. Before the mortgage is ever placed.
If the work is done correctly up front — if you truly understand the deal, the property, and the market — then taking possession of a home is not a crisis. It’s just a process. One you’ve already prepared for without knowing you’d ever need to.
Good systems protect you before you ever need them.
Which is worth sitting with for a moment — because it applies well beyond mortgage administration.
When did you last take a real look at your financing structure? Your banking relationships? The covenants on your operating line? Not because something is wrong. But because that’s exactly when you should. Before something is wrong is the only time you have the luxury of being thoughtful about it.
The business owners who are best positioned when things get hard aren’t the ones who reacted fastest. They’re the ones who had already done the work.
We don’t have many power of sales. We work hard to make sure of that. But the odd one is inevitable, and honestly I’ve come to see them as an opportunity — a chance to prove that the systems and best practices we’ve built from the beginning of a deal to the end actually work.
This one will prove that.
The witch, on the other hand, I did not see coming.
Until next week,
Vince
P.S. She’s still in the bedroom as far as I know. Whoever buys that house is getting a bonus!
