Years of delays, sixteen reset dates - then one misstep unraveled the whole sale
A completed foreclosure sale collapsed on August 18, 2026, after Connecticut's Appellate Court ruled the property changed hands too soon to count.
Under the state's court rules, that timing made the sale a legal nullity from the start. The case had run for years. Deutsche Bank National Trust Company, acting as trustee for a mortgage securitization trust, sued to foreclose on a Wallingford home in May 2016. After mediation failed, the homeowner filed an answer and an eleven-count counterclaim in October 2017. The trial court struck the counterclaim, granted summary judgment on liability only, and rendered a judgment of foreclosure by sale in July 2018.
Then came the delays. The court reset the sale date sixteen times, held up by the COVID-19 pandemic, five bankruptcy filings by a co-defendant, and two appeals by the homeowner. In February 2025 it set the sale for a seventeenth time.
The problem that undid the sale came next. After the homeowner's third appeal was dismissed as frivolous in March 2025, he asked the state Supreme Court for permission to take the case higher. That petition mattered. Under Connecticut's rules, it kept an automatic stay in place - a freeze on any step to carry out the foreclosure judgment - until the Supreme Court acted. The court did not rule until April 30, 2025.
The sale went ahead on April 12, 2025, with the freeze still on. The committee running the sale later asked the trial court to approve it, and in July 2025 the court did.
Before the appellate panel, the bank did not dispute the timing but argued the error was harmless. By the time the trial court approved the sale, it said, the Supreme Court had denied the petition and the stay was gone. The panel rejected that. A foreclosure sale held while a stay is in effect is "void ab initio," it said - void from the very beginning - and the rule blocking such sales is "mandatory." No harmless-error analysis can revive it.
The three judges reversed the approval and sent the case back with direction to vacate the sale. They did not disturb the underlying foreclosure judgment, which stands on remand.
The point for lenders and servicers is narrow but sharp. An automatic appellate stay does not end the moment a lower appeal is dismissed. A timely petition to a higher court keeps it alive, sometimes for weeks. Push a sale through that window and it collapses, whatever the strength of the judgment behind it. In Connecticut the court itself is the seller and the sale committee only its agent, with no authority to sell while proceedings are frozen. Confirm every avenue of review is truly closed before the property changes hands.
