The lender already had the one tool it needed – and reached for another anyway
Maine's highest court has drawn a hard line for foreclosing lenders: you cannot sell the house until you've won the case.
On May 28, 2026, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court threw out an order that had handed a receiver control of a North Berwick home – with the power to fix it up and sell it – while the underlying foreclosure was still unresolved. For anyone who runs a servicing or default operation, the ruling is a clean warning about how far a mortgagee's remedies actually stretch before judgment.
Start with the facts as the court laid them out. On August 7, 2023, Towd Point Mortgage Trust 2019-4 filed for foreclosure against borrower Leslie Bodwell and eleven other parties with an interest in the property. The court's account traces the loan back to April 8, 2005, when Bodwell signed a $250,000 note to Amerihome Mortgage Company, LLC, secured by the North Berwick residence. Towd Point took assignment of the mortgage on November 13, 2020. The default, according to the court, began with the payment due April 1, 2020, and continued from there.
One of the interested parties, K&R Holdings, Inc., held a stake in the property dating to a 2010 writ of execution worth $13,900.43. K&R is the party that carried this fight to the top.
In October 2024, Towd Point asked the trial court to declare the home abandoned and to appoint a receiver – someone to secure the property, make repairs, and market and sell it, with the proceeds parked in escrow until the court decided who got what. The trial court granted it. K&R appealed, arguing the court had no authority to appoint a receiver in the first place.
The Law Court sided with K&R, and the reasoning is the part worth filing away.
First, the statutes. The court explained that one provision, 14 M.R.S. § 6327, lets a lender enter a property, abate a nuisance, and secure it – but says nothing about a receiver who can sell. A companion provision, § 6326, lets a lender ask a court to declare a property abandoned, but that finding does only two things: it moves the case up the docket and cuts the borrower's redemption period from ninety days to forty-five. A receiver, the court said, is simply not a remedy that flows from a finding of abandonment.
When that argument ran out, Towd Point reached for the court's general equitable powers at oral argument. The court shut that down with a basic principle: equity is available only when the law offers no adequate remedy. Towd Point already had one – foreclosure, which it had already started and was well on its way to finishing. On top of that, the mortgage itself allowed the lender to inspect the home, enter it, repair it, and remove hazards.
The court's conclusion was blunt. A lender cannot get around the foreclosure process by using a receiver to sell the property before a final foreclosure judgment.
The receiver order was vacated and the case remanded. And in a detail that stings, the court noted the receivership appears to have delayed the foreclosure rather than speeding it along - the very opposite of what the lender set out to achieve.
