Mar

Foreclosure Trash Outs – Everything Goes

Emptying a Foreclosure of It’s Contents

Recently, the president of a homeowner association flagged me down as I was driving through his community to find out the status of a neighborhood foreclosure. Since foreclosures are rare in this area the residents are itching to know what is going on with it. The community happens to be a modest, well established, deed restricted community where foreclosures are quite rare so everyone is paying attention.

It had been months since they’d seen a real estate agent come out and let a foreclosure clean out crew in to do their work. The foreclosure clean out crews are the “bagel shops of the ‘90’s” and a byproduct of the foreclosure crisis. When lenders foreclose and have to sell their re-acquired property they hire a company to empty the house of things and clean up the premises.

The residents living near this foreclosure were surprised to learn that when the crews arrive they’re job is to remove all of the “garbage”. Garbage is a loosely used term that means furniture in foreclosure speak.

It may surprise you to know that entire households full of furniture are busted down to kindling, put in a dumpster and hauled to the landfill. So is anything else left behind; photographs, documents, children’s toys.

The scope of the job is to get in and get out as soon as possible, load the dumpster and hit the road for the next job. Though I don’t know what the solution would be to recycling or reselling the items that are left behind I still can’t help but think it’s a terrible waste. It’s a waste that someone lost their home and it’s a waste that the things can’t be recycled or given to someone that could benefit from them.

It just seems like more waste and excess produced by the financial waste and excess. Then again, who would expect a bank to have any sort of organization to liquidating household contents when they can’t even liquidate homes trapped in their crappy mortgages?

Unlike banks, the government thinks furniture is actually worth something. You can always count on the government to find value in nothing, right?

I’ve been keeping tabs on a home owner going through the bankruptcy process. The court trustee will give a person going through bankruptcy the opportunity to purchase their own furniture back after it is appraised or they can haul it to the auction house and have it liquidated.

The appraiser hired by the courts found this mans furniture to be worth a whopping $389. The owner even says it isn’t worth the gas to drive it there but the courts will either make him haul it to auction or buy it back so that every last dime gets wrung out of the bankruptcy and the trustee gets a cut.

That sofa with Cheerios in the cushions and dog whiz on the corner is up for auction at a warehouse near you, because our government believes that it actually is worth something. A nearly new Broyhill dining room set is at the landfill because a bank believes its garbage. I can’t wait to see banks and government get together and iron out the big issues like the credit crisis.

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Real Life in Bonita Springs is a project by Chris Griffith dedicated to writing useful blog posts for consumers about the Bonita Springs, Florida area. Find out what it is really like to live in Bonita Springs, Florida by reading about our fair city. You’ll get the latest in local real estate information, Bonita Springs real estate market reports and a little bit of humor. If you have topic ideas, feel free to request a story about the idea, after all, this site is just for you.

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