Trash Out

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Foreclosure Trash-Out: Ill Fortune and Its Leavings

Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

WHAT’S LEFT BEHIND

Workers from the Contractor Support Management company discard items from a house in Moreno Valley, Calif late one summer evening.

Los Angeles, Calif.

Abandoned belongings include furniture and toys.

AT 6:30 on a Wednesday morning in February, James Brewer backed a pickup truck with a trailer into the driveway of a one-story beige house in a new subdivision called L.A. Oaks and looked down at the day’s first work order.

“It’s 10 cubic yards interior, 5 exterior,” he told his three-man crew as they climbed out of the truck and pulled on canvas gloves. Within a minute, the four men had fanned out across the property.

Mr. Brewer walked from one mostly empty room to the next — the open kitchen equipped with new appliances, the living room with its working fireplace, the walk-in closet off the master suite — snapping “before” pictures for the bank that had recently taken possession of the house. Andrew Fisher and Mike Zurn followed close behind, sweeping telephone books, paper scraps and other random junk into plastic garbage bins.

“Hey, dude, hold off on that,” Mr. Brewer said to Mr. Fisher, who stood beside a wooden desk with built-in shelving in one of the bedrooms. “I’m going to call my wife and see if she wants it.”

Outside, George Bernal tidied the backyard with a weed trimmer, a job made easier by the large patches of bare earth. He worked his way around a Christmas tree lying on its side, a clue to how recently people had lived here.

Just over an hour after they had arrived, they were done: the yard was clean, the house cleared, the “after” pictures taken. The men, members of a “trash out” crew charged with hauling away what’s left in foreclosed houses, had removed any sign of a home life from this one in L.A. Oaks.

Mr. Brewer and his colleagues work for Contractor Support Management, an online company based in nearby Los Angels county that has been around for 13 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 Contractorsupportonline.com 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,” as Thomas Crown, president of Contractor Support Online, put it.

In the three years since the mortgage crisis began, the company has expanded its preservation unit from 2,200 people more than 5,300 across the country hiring in every state, and Mr. Brewer 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, Los Angeles County and other parts of the California 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 Contractor Support, statistics like this have translated to between 75 and 100 trash-outs a week per city, with more orders coming in every day from the banks.

“It’s been a boom and a blessing,” Mr. Crown said. “Have I bought a beach house and a Learjet? No. But I’ve been able to maintain a reasonable standard of living for my employees,” who now number about 5,400, up from about 2,200 three years ago. “I’d say we’ll be doing this steadily for the next five or seven years,” he added, sounding confident.

AFTER the L.A. Oaks job, Mr. Brewer drove home. At 32, he has been doing trash-outs for just a couple of years (before that he was in the Army), but he is already a seasoned assessor. He first got the foreclosure jobs from a company called Contractor Support Online out of California. He had a friend who had good luck with the company and so he decided to try it out and well like they say, "The rest is history". contractorsupportonline.com contractorsupport

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

Thomas Crown is a successful construction business owner, and success coach Since 1995,Thomas has overpowered the art of construction lead services by learning through his mistakes and by promoting numerous misguided business opportunities in the past. He is also an active member of various other programs that have a provided him and his family a consistently large income for many years. Visit contractorsupportonline.com!

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