§ 725a.Right to Bring Suit

Most California home loans are secured by a deed of trust rather than an old-fashioned mortgage, and most lenders foreclose through a trustee's sale, a quick out-of-court process that never touches this chapter. Section 725a exists for the moment a beneficiary, trustee, or mortgagee decides not to take that route. It gives the beneficiary or trustee of a deed of trust, and the mortgagee under a mortgage carrying a power of sale, the right to bring a judicial foreclosure suit instead, and it folds that suit into the same chapter that has always governed ordinary mortgage foreclosures. The right passes to anyone who later succeeds to the beneficiary's, trustee's, or mortgagee's interest, so an assignee of the loan can foreclose judicially too.

That cross-reference matters because a judicial foreclosure carries consequences a trustee's sale doesn't. Section 726's one-action rule folds the whole judicial route into a single lawsuit against the property, and the borrower keeps a statutory right to redeem the property for months after the sale. A trustee's sale under a deed of trust generally carries no such redemption right. The choice between the two routes can also affect whether the lender can pursue the borrower for whatever the sale doesn't cover: Section 580d cuts off any deficiency judgment once the property has been sold at a nonjudicial trustee's sale, while a judicial foreclosure under this section remains subject only to the narrower purchase-money limits in Section 580b. That difference is one reason a lender occasionally chooses the slower judicial path.