👉 Okay, let’s tackle this wonderfully weird beast of a phrase – the infamous "’457 Auction." Now, before you start picturing some sort-of-secretive, maybe slightly shifty, badger-ancock proceeding, let me assure you: neither that's entirely accurate.
Basically, in the cutthroat realm of real estate closings (specifically with Wells Fargo and similar title companies—we don’t want to get too into specifics unless you really want a finance degree headache), there was this peculiar loophole. Around 2017, they started offering something called an "’457 Statutory Auction." Here's what happened: Essentially, they were essentially auctioning off the right to foreclose on a distressed homeowner's house, with the gavel banging happening before that homeowner actually officially defaulted. They figured, hey! Let's get ahead of the curve and basically bully our way into foreclosure terms, then let the homeowner scramble to fix it in the ensuing mess. The weird part? Because the auction was technically a statutory one (meaning it was governed by state foreclosure laws rather than federal ones), there were some really murky legal grounds, and Wells Fargo was notoriously aggressive about pushing this process. It was... not pretty for many homeowners, who felt utterly railroaded, to say the least! The whole thing became a massive, ethically fraught mess that eventually got shut down by Dodd Frank in 2019
