Venice woman allowed to keep home


Courtesy of the Herald Tribune

Posted August 6, 2005

By PAUL QUINLAN 

 

SOUTH VENICE -- A last-minute legal maneuver and a check from a Shriners clown saved a single mother from losing her home Friday.
    

Karin Healy, the Venice woman whose homeowners association auctioned off her house after she failed to pay her dues, will keep her home, a judge ruled Friday.

"I'm going to sleep wonderfully tonight," the 47-year-old woman said after embracing her daughters as she emerged from the courtroom Friday morning. "I couldn't be happier."

The Fairway Village of Sarasota Homeowners Association sold Healy's home at auction on July 20 for $11,000 in an effort to collect on her $6,165 debt, which included about two years of unpaid dues, interest, penalties and attorney's fees. The buyer also

Karin Healy, left, hugs her attorney, Nancy Cason, outside the courtroom Friday in Venice. Healy's house had been auctioned by her homeowners association.

would have assumed Healy's $137,000 mortgage debt.

     

The case demonstrated the power that homeowners associations hold over their members and raised questions about whether they should be allowed to sell off a resident's home to settle relatively minor debts.

In a 15-minute hearing, Healy's attorney, Nancy Cason, argued that the wording of the court's foreclosure judgment, which came June 2, afforded Healy a 10-day window after the sale to file an objection and essentially stop the title from changing hands.

At the advice of a previous attorney, Healy had filed her objection five days after the auction in a two-page, handwritten letter.

"If she had not written that letter, I think we would not have had the legal argument we had today," Cason said. "The law favors you in keeping your property."

Before Friday's hearing, Healy posted the $6,165 with the court, prompting Circuit Court Judge Nancy K. Donnellan to dismiss the sale without objection from either the association's attorney, Sharon Vander Wulp, or the buyer of the home.

"We want to give the homeowner the most chance to retain possession of the house," Vander Wulp told the judge.

Healy said after the hearing that a Shriners clown had stepped forward and helped her with the debt after hearing of her plight. She would not identify the benefactor.

Since her story first appeared in the Herald-Tribune on Wednesday, Healy said she had been deluged with supportive phone calls. One Englewood family, she said, sent her a check for $30, which she plans to return.

"It has restored my faith in human nature," Healy said. "My phone has been ringing nonstop with so much support and good wishes."

Vander Wulp declined to comment after the hearing. In telephone interviews Friday afternoon, both she and Bob Moore, a partner at her firm, Kanetsky, Moore & DeBoer, said they structure their final foreclosure judgments to provide homeowners with a last-minute chance to pay association debts.

"Our aim is to have people pay the assessment, not to take their house away from them," Vander Wulp said.

Healy, whose financial problems culminated in her filing for bankruptcy last fall, said she struggled to find an attorney who would represent her at Friday's hearing.

The attorney who recommended that she write her objection letter after the house auction declined to represent her further, she said, because he had planned to go on vacation. She said she called at least 30 others who refused to take her case before meeting with Cason on Thursday, the day before the hearing. The 28-year-old real estate attorney with Syprett, Meshad, Resnick & Lieb in Sarasota agreed to take the case free of charge.

"They were all negative. They said: 'You probably don't have a leg to stand on; I'm busy; I'm in court; I'm going on vacation; I am on vacation,' " Healy said. "(Cason) called, said, 'Meet me tomorrow.' She was excellent."

In her objection letter, Healy argued that she never received advance notice of the foreclosure or sale, which divested her of what she estimated to be more than $200,000 in home equity.

One nearly identical home in the neighborhood sold in April for $320,000.

During the hearing, Cason reiterated Healy's claim that she never was properly notified of the foreclosure or sale. Vander Wulp had objected to the claim in a brief filed in the days before the hearing. The judge declared the point moot.

"I do not need to find whether notice was made," the judge said, granting the motion to redeem the house.

Healy said she plans to stay at her home in Fairway Village, the small, two-street, 124-home neighborhood adjacent but not related to the Plantation Golf and Country Club.

"I harbor no ill will," Healy said.


Herald-Tribune reporter Will Rothschild contributed to this story.


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