If you are facing the possibility of foreclosure and would like information about your options, the websites listed here may provide some answers.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) offers information about foreclosure at several locations online: 

The State of California offers home mortgage information for prospective homebuyers or homeowners who are having trouble keeping their payments current. 

San Mateo County residents who need an attorney to deal with a foreclosure problem may contact the San Mateo County Bar Associations Lawyer Referral Service

You can contact the San Mateo County Bar Association Lawyer Referral Service by calling 650.369.4149 and pressing “3″ at the prompt.

If you are seeking information on specific properties in foreclosure or statistics in San Mateo County, we do not have this information. Here’s the role of the Recorder in this process:

  1. We record Notices of Default submitted by lenders. These notices are pre-foreclosure documents. These are not easily used to identify properties as they give no specific information – only the name and address of the mortgage holder or lender as well as the reference information to the deed of trust. (No foreclosure has taken place at this point in the process.)
  2. When a foreclosure occurs, the actual foreclosure is posted in the Hall of Justice by the lender; there is no paperwork filed in our office.
  3. After a foreclosed property sells, the Trustee’s Deed is recorded in our office.

Private companies or abstractors regularly visit our office, comb through the records to create database lists and sell the information to large companies for mass distribution. We do not issue statistics nor track the documents that are recorded here.