Can You Sell a House in Forbearance in Massachusetts?

Yes. In most cases you can sell a house in forbearance the same way you would sell any other mortgaged house, because forbearance pauses or reduces your payments, it does not touch who owns the property. Your lender or servicer has agreed to let you skip or shrink payments for a period, not taken any interest in the title. What changes is the number the servicer hands you at closing, because the payments you did not make while the loan was in forbearance are still owed and generally come off the sale proceeds along with the rest of the payoff.

What Forbearance Actually Does to the Loan

Forbearance is an agreement with your servicer to temporarily pause or reduce your mortgage payments, not a write-off. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is direct about this: forbearance does not reduce what you owe, and any missed or reduced payments still have to be repaid. Federal mortgage servicing rules treat forbearance as one form of loss mitigation a servicer can offer, alongside a repayment plan or a loan modification, and govern how servicers evaluate and administer those options. While you are performing under an agreed plan, the servicer generally cannot refer the loan to foreclosure or move toward a sale of the property on its own, which is part of why forbearance exists in the first place: it buys time without forcing a decision immediately.

Forbearance plans are not identical. Some end in a lump-sum repayment demand, some spread the missed amount across higher payments for a period, and some simply add the missed amount to the back of the loan, to be collected at payoff, sale, or refinance. Which structure applies to you depends on your servicer and who actually owns the loan, whether that is a government-backed program, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or a portfolio lender. That is also why two neighbors who both took forbearance in the same year can end up with very different payoff figures when they each go to sell.

Can You Sell a House in Forbearance and Still Walk Away With Something?

Often, yes, and it depends entirely on your equity. The missed or reduced payments accumulated during forbearance get added to what the servicer is owed, whether that happens through a lump sum at the end of the plan, a repayment plan, or deferral of the missed amount to the back of the loan. At a sale, all of that comes due at once out of the proceeds, the same way a traditional mortgage payoff works, just starting from a higher number than your most recent statement shows. If the house has enough equity to cover the full payoff plus the deferred amount, selling resolves the forbearance cleanly. If it does not, you are looking at a short sale instead, which is a different process with the lender’s cooperation required.

Get a Written Payoff Figure Before You Price the House

This is the step that gets skipped. Ask your servicer, in writing, for a payoff statement that is good through your expected closing date and that explicitly states whatever amount was deferred or missed during the forbearance period. A balance quoted from your online account or your last statement typically will not include it, because that figure usually reflects the regular loan terms rather than the forbearance arrangement layered on top of them. Tell your listing agent and the closing attorney about the forbearance early, since title and escrow sometimes need extra lead time to confirm the figure with the servicer before they can finalize anything. Waiting until the week of closing to raise it is the single most common way a forbearance sale gets delayed at the last minute.

Forbearance Is Not the Same as a Right to Cure Notice

The two get confused because both show up when a borrower is behind, but they are different steps that can happen in a different order. Forbearance is something you generally ask for, or your servicer offers, before a formal default has been declared. A notice of right to cure is a specific legal notice a lender sends after declaring a default, and in Massachusetts it opens a fixed window, at least 90 days under Massachusetts General Laws chapter 244, section 35A, before any foreclosure step can begin. You can be in forbearance without ever receiving a right to cure notice, and you can receive a right to cure notice without ever having been offered forbearance. If your letter is the latter rather than the former, the rules and the timeline are different from what is described here.

What This Means If You Are the One Selling

If your plan is ending soon, or your servicer has asked for a lump sum you cannot pay, selling before the deadline is usually the cleaner outcome compared to waiting to see what happens at the end of the plan. If you are behind on payments more broadly rather than specifically in an active forbearance plan, the options look somewhat different and are covered separately.

In the deals we have closed, signed agreement to funds in hand typically runs 2 to 4 weeks once title comes back clean, which matters here because a forbearance plan usually has its own deadline you are working against. We also see, consistently, that the one thing that reliably kills a conventional buyer’s financing is a major structural or safety defect, not simply a house that has gone without updating for a while. Houses that sat in forbearance for a stretch have often also gone without routine maintenance for the same stretch, which is worth knowing before you assume a traditional buyer’s lender will finance the sale on the timeline your forbearance deadline requires. Requesting a cash offer gets you a number to compare against listing, without betting the forbearance deadline on a buyer’s mortgage approval.

None of this is legal or financial advice, and servicers vary in how they structure a forbearance payoff. Confirm your specific figure and timeline directly with your servicer in writing, and a HUD-approved housing counselor or a Massachusetts attorney can review your actual agreement if anything about the payoff looks wrong.