One man's trash-out is another man's treasure

[primroselane]

WSR Sales and Management, ia a real estate company based in Riverside, California, that has been around for 27 years, but has lately reinvented itself as a specialist in “home preservation” — the process of cleaning, securing and maintaining foreclosed properties for banks that begins with the process referred to as trashing out.
Companies like WSR have been starting up (or similarly retooling) across the country in the last year, particularly in the Southwest and Florida, where the mortgage crisis has done heavy damage. In these places, such companies are finding themselves “off-the-chart busy,”

In the three years since the mortgage crisis began in the Riverside area, the company has expanded its preservation unit from 2 people to 60, and Mr. Plocher now oversees five trash-out crews that work 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, along with another 23 crews that perform regular landscaping and maid services for roughly a thousand houses that have already been cleaned out and put on the market.

Even in a state where more than 80,000 homes were in foreclosure proceedings in February, Riverside County and other parts of the Inland Empire region east of Los Angeles have been hit exceptionally hard. Also in February, John Husing, an economist whose company, Economics and Politics Inc., issues regular reports on the area’s economy, told a building industry group that roughly a third of the nearly 360,000 homes sold in the Inland Empire between 2004 and 2007 have been served with notices of default. For WSR, statistics like this have translated to between 75 and 100 trash-outs a week, with more orders coming in every day from the banks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/garden/19trash.html

[Ken Scharabok]

Trash out is probably a good term. A neighbor's son does it as a side business. He said you would have to see to believe the condition in which some of the homes are left. Some folks intentionally trash them as revenge against the finance company. He cleans them out and then either does, or arranges to have done, fix-up work to make the homes sellable. Many walk away from furniture and appliances as they were financed, and defaulted, as well.

Recall an forum thread sometime late last year or so of a family who had numerous dogs which they couldn't take to their new location. They left them in the house, returning ever so often to put out food and water. You can image what that house must have been like.

I caught most of one Flip This House program (the cat house). Guy bought the house without having seen inside it first. Trash was deep everywhere, but worse numerous cats confined inside. As I recall he had to hire a professional hazardous material clean-up crew for something like $12K just to get it down to floors. Then problem after problem was found, such as broken waste water lines.

[soulsurvivor]

If (big "if" there) but if I were young again, a trash out business would be my calling in a life occupation, especially from the resale of the personal property associated with real estate point of view. We have very few local independents that provide the service. It's mostly handled by the real estate agents through an auction or listing. If/when family estates have to be disbursed, often much of the personal property ends up at the landfill because family don't always care to deal with it, or just don't know what to do with it. In many instances, people don't know that the old vase they just trashed is a collector item, etc. Same thing happens when families are moving - they do the "easy" and take it to the landfill.

[motivated]

Well I live about 30 miles from Riverside. California is now at a 10.5 percent unemployment rate. When I went down the hill recently I was amazed at the number of vacant business's, homes and rentals. It makes me wonder where these people have gone, as it is very expensive to move out of state.