Flagler County, FL Foreclosure Wrap-up With Legal to English Translation

It’s difficult to decipher the Legal Advertisements of foreclosure notices and sales.

July 7, 2007 – Palm Coast, FL – The News-Tribune is Flagler County’s newspaper of record. Here, under the category “Legal Advertisement,”  you will find notices of public meeting, marriage dissolutions, public sales, requests for bids for public projects, etc. But if you are interested in real estate, four types of notice are most interesting.  

• Notice of delinquent taxes
• Notice of tax deed sale
• Notice of action to foreclose
• Notice of foreclosure sale

I’ve covered the first two in previous articles:

• “What Happens When Real Estate Taxes Become Delinquent?”
• “Florida Tax Certificates, Part Two” 

Here, I’m focusing on the last two notice types. Statutes dictate certain procedures be followed by lien holders when they reach the decision that a mortgage loan is noncollectable – when they decide to exercise their right as lien holder, to force the sale of the encumbered real estate. These procedures include public notices: 

• Notice of Action – communicates the fact that an action to foreclose on a particular property has been taken.
• Notice of Foreclosure Sale – announces the time, and location of the public sale. 

As legal advertisements, foreclosure notices must comply with statutes. For instance, the street address is not the legal description of the real estate, so it’s typically not found in the notice. Instead, we are presented the property’s legal description. Since Palm Coast is a relatively recent creation, most legal descriptions contain entries such as Lot Number, Block Number, Plat Map Book page numbers, subdivision name etc. For most of you, these descriptions might as well be written in Greek. But wouldn’t you really like to know which properties are foreclosed? I’ll do the translation for you.

Working from Legal Advertisements in the July 7, 2007 issue of the Flagler/Palm Coast News-Tribune and by examining public records, I developed a list of properties advertised under Notice of Action to Foreclose and Notice of Foreclosure Sale. All advertised foreclosure sales will occur between July 20 and July 31. See individual notices if you are interested in attending. They are at 11:00 a.m. Here are the steps I followed: 

1. Find the name of the property owner. It’s the name listed as "Defendant" in the Notice
2. Go to the Flagler County Property Appraiser’s website (here is the link)
3. Click on "Search Records"
4. Click "Yes, I accept the above statement"
5. Click "Search by owner name"
6. Enter the owner’s last name
7. Select the correct property from the list by finding the owner’s full name. Hint: the lot number is the first three digits of the last set of four numbers of the parcel number (e.g. 0230 means lot 23)
8. Click on the parcel number to get the full record. Here you can see the full legal description to verify that you have the right parcel. The property address is part of this record.
9. Do not confuse the owner’s address with the property address

This takes some practice and plenty of time to make sure you get the right parcel. Here’s my list in language that I hope is more understandable.