CONCORD — A bill intended to give more warning to homeowners facing foreclosure came to an end on Thursday after the Senate voted by voice vote to kill it, citing objections from banks and credit unions.

The legislation, H.B. 309, would have required a sheriff to hand-deliver a notice of sale to a delinquent homeowner. Under present law, when a bank intends to sell a property, that notice must only be mailed to the homeowner.

Advocates such as New Hampshire Legal Assistance, which provides legal resources for low-income homeowners, said the mail can often be lost and ignored, and argued the bill would create a more direct way for homeowners to be informed. Sometimes, while the owners know they’re behind on mortgage payments, they aren’t fully aware of how far behind or that their efforts to increase payments have been unsuccessful, advocates have argued.

The bill would have required the sheriff to either deliver the notice by hand or leave a copy on the premises. And it sought to make that the notice itself explicit about the recourse a homeowner has to fight the non-judicial foreclosure procedure if he or she believes it was illegally issued.

That recourse also would be changed from a petition to a complaint, with the effect that the foreclosure would be immediately halted while the courts stepped in.

But a broad array of banks, credit unions and municipalities have fiercely fought the proposed change, arguing it would tie up the court system and slow down foreclosures to a crawl. They said that procedures developed by the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau already have created guidelines for banks to follow during foreclosures, though advocates have said they are poorly enforced.

On Thursday, Sen. Harold French, R-Franklin, argued that the consensus against the bill from those groups had been convincing.

“The committee found that there was a large amount of opposition to the bill form various stakeholders and the financial community,” he said.

But despite the voice vote, Sen. Dan Feltes, D-Concord, remained in favor.

“Establishing a process and going through it in some cases will expedite the (legal) process, rather than putting the onus on homeowners to go to court to stop a potentially unlawful foreclosure and instead going through a process right away … is what most the states do,” he said.