COVID-19 is wreaking havoc on life as we know it. Little has been left untouched, including the mortgage market and foreclosure process. 

At the federal level, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which oversees Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks, is providing payment forbearance for up to 12 months to borrowers impacted by the crisis. FHFA also directed Fannie and Freddie to suspend foreclosures for at least 60 days. The Department of Housing and Urban Development also suspended evictions and foreclosures until the end of April.

Many state and local governments are also offering relief to borrowers affected by the crisis.

According to running lists maintained by the Motley Fool and the National Low Income Housing Coalition, executive or judiciary branches in at least 16 states, and a few cities and counties, have placed various time-limited moratoriums on foreclosures and evictions. These state and local actions affect mortgages that are not underwritten by the federal government. (Non-Government Sponsored Enterprises accounted for approximately 64 percent of all residential mortgages in the U.S. in 2019, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.)

Private banks have also instituted a wide range of relief programs for their mortgage customers. Forbes is keeping a running tally.

The result of all this activity, of course, has been a suppression of foreclosure activity and a significant reduction in the number of foreclosure notices being published in local newspapers.

“Foreclosure notices are down huge,” said Brad Thompson, CEO of Detroit Legal News Publishing Co. and PNRC President. “The first two weeks of March were normal, then it dropped off a cliff,” he said. Detroit Legal News publishes nine legal newspapers in Michigan and also operates a placement service that runs public notices in other papers throughout the state.

Thompson’s ballpark estimate: Foreclosure notices since mid-March have been down 80 percent. “They’re probably going almost to zero for the next 60 days or so, and are likely to stay low through the rest of 2020,” he added.

J.C. Stock agrees with that assessment. “We’re definitely looking at a major slow down,” said the owner of STOX Posting and Publishing, a full-service posting and publishing company that handles trustee sales. “We service both coasts and have already seen a drop of 70 percent to 80 percent in new referrals.”

“With all the state lockdowns in place, we would have a hard time moving forward with some of our posting and sale requirements even without the moratoriums,” he explained. “If we can’t physically post or serve notices, we can’t publish notices. If people can’t attend auctions, we can’t publish notices.”

Vahn Babigian believes the moratoriums will create a backlog and when foreclosures start back up, notices will come back full force. The general manager of Metropolitan News Company, which owns seven newspapers in California and also operates a public-notice placement service, recommends publishers stay in touch with their public notice clients to ensure they know you are ready when they begin publishing notices again.

“We don’t have much control over the situation, other than to wait for the backlog to be released,” Babigian said. He added that in the face of a revenue slowdown, newspaper publishers should do all they can to keep their employees healthy. 

“I believe we will get the business back when all is clear, and I think we need to keep the doors open, so my biggest concern is keeping our staff safe,” he said. “What happens if someone in a newspaper tests positive for the virus? It probably means everyone will get quarantined. Despite being an essential exempt business, we are out of business if we get shut down for public health reasons.”

At the end of the day, Babigian recommends newspapers do what they do best: Report the news to their communities.

“This is a time that we can remind the public and the politicians of our value. Others provide plenty of national and international news, but our communities need local information,” he said. “We need to give legislators reason to pause and think about the true value newspapers provide. Without local news coverage, what is a democracy?”