The county he lives in may have a website for something like online property data or the county tax assessor. If you know the address you can search for the property and the results may include the current status of the house.
The amount of information available may depend on the particular county. At my old job we frequently had cause to look up properties (to find the age of the buildings on them) and one county in particular revealed very little information compared to the others.
The county assessor can tell you if he is deficient on his property taxes. You may be able to look that up online in a few minutes depending on the county. The county title office (or whatever it’s called there) can also tell you if there is a mortgage on the property but it can’t tell you if the mortgage is current.
“Foreclosure” is a word that regular people use casually in slightly different ways but it’s best thought of as a process. Here is an article about the foreclosure process in Florida. I can’t vouch for its accuracy but it sounds roughly right to my ears based on my casual reading about the process in other states.
Drawing from that article, you might be able to learn something about the status of the foreclosure depending on where your brother is in that process. If he has only just started being late on his payments, there is nothing public but he may be accruing additional fees that make foreclosure harder to escape later.
If he has received a breach letter, you could ask him to see it but if he doesn’t share that with you, no one else (like the credit union or the lender) will give it to you. It’s still his confidential business at this point.
If the mortgage is more than 120 days past due, the lender can file a lawsuit to foreclose. The lawsuit is public and you can find out about that in the local courthouse. Show up, ask what my friend used to call “the little old ladies in white tennis shoes” (court clerks) if a foreclosure suit has been filed against your brother. Ideally, you will know his name, the property address, and the name of his lender. (You can try looking it up online but few states seem to have publicly accessible online records of lawsuits readily available).
Before the lender forecloses, it must publish a notice of sale in the newspaper. Obviously, this is intended to be public but the irony is that the lender will pick the absolute cheapest newspaper that qualifies to publish the notice in. This is likely a tiny newspaper you have never heard of with almost no circulation that exists almost solely to run classified ads for things like foreclosure proceedings and other judicial actions. They often don’t bother to put the ads online. It’s often surprisingly hard to find these notices even when you are looking for them. There are commercial services (largely aimed at real estate agents and “we buy homes!” vultures that aggregate court records and these public newspaper notices to alert them when homes are going into foreclosure. Those services are a bit pricy to buy for your own casual use but if you know a local real estate agent in the area who subscribes, perhaps you could ask them to look the house up for you.
Finally, after the home is sold in the foreclosure auction, the buyer can (according to the article I linked) file for a writ of possession in the court. This will also be public but at this point, the foreclosure itself is over and your brother will be evicted forthwith.
Do you think it is a tax foreclosure or a bank foreclosure? Either way look up the address if the county/city has a property search. My county and city have Beacon which is part Schneider (sp?) Corporation.
The link for property taxes should tell you how far behind and if it is scheduled for a Sheriff’s sale. If the mortgage is held by a financial institution it should have their name. Call them and say you are concerned about the “financial ability “ of a client of yours (your brother, but they don’t need to know that) and was wondering if he is in errors on any financial obligations he has with them. They may not, and probably will not, give you dollar amounts but will let you know if there are issues.
